


A Loonaverse Tale

by DJ_TNT



Series: A Loonaverse Tale [1]
Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, F/F, Fantasy, Female Friendship, Female Relationships, Fluff, Frenemies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-01-16 14:44:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18523666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJ_TNT/pseuds/DJ_TNT
Summary: Pining high school girls with super powers yet untold, guardians of the in-between each on their own quest, and conflicted goddesses from Eden all destined to meet. How could things possibly get stranger in the Loonaverse?





	1. Color In This Side of Eden

**Author's Note:**

> My take on the Loonaverse with plenty of twists and turns but also sweet moments to boost. You can lmk what you think and leave comments/suggestions here and on my Twitter @12butterflymoon ^^ #LoonaverseTale

**Chapter 1** _in which a girl tries to color the world or rather one person in particular, a youngster is lost to the forest or so she thought, and two immortals leave Eden to search for someone leaving two of their friends behind but not for long.._

 

 **Note:**  I'm going to start writing these little short chapter intros to try to make some things a little more obvious, but please do ask if you're confused about anything. It is supposed to be written a bit cryptically though I may do a rewrite later and add on more to clarify some points.

* * *

 

 

“Is it on?” she heard the short yearbook committee president asking below her. The locker room showed itself fully on camera, the sweaty girls’ soccer team completely in view. To check anyways, Hyunjin retracted her selfie-stick-length arms to inspect the camcorder. Her long black hair draped over her broad shoulders loosely, further showing off her stature. But for all the muscle and height and in her marigold jersey and golden cleats of all things, she seemed tame and meek in comparison. Her snub nose and clear eyes with plump skin under them making her look the part of a gentle heroine. To an extent, she was. She merely nodded yes in acknowledgment to the question with a semi-resemblance of a grin.

 

“Good.” The senior in a juniper leather jacket so dark it might as well be black, denim pants and a tight-fitting tucked-in plain white tee below her laughed for seemingly no reason. “Captain of the Wildcats, Kim Hyunjin, how does it feel to just have won the regional championship?” she began her interview using the air she cupped in her hand and her naturally resonating voice as her mic. Her chipper demeanor doubled as her amiability. She too was a woman of contrast. Her sleek bob against her sharp eyes were downright piercing. That is, until her crinkled teeth-filled smile and eyes sparkling like emerald would give her away. To her teachers, she was ‘that quirky Haseul girl’. To her underclassmen and committee members, she was a leader-nim, mom, or both. She was boisterously warm at times and deliberately quiet others. Like the moon rising, waxing, making her another, she was full on screen and wane off. A dilapidated dollop cosplaying as an ideal fine-tuned student.

 

Oblivious to this, Hyunjin pondered briefly, and then gave a rather generic yet well-mannered answer about what an honor it was. How it was a group effort and all. She would’ve went on to thank her whole team and maybe even manage an overformal “I love you all,” if an oversized mascot head on top of an extra slim figure in black and pastel pink plaid didn’t make its way over to her. It nudged her on the shoulder, pressing against her surprisingly still-pappy cheeks with a vengeance. “Ah, help. A wild cat is trying to maul me,” she said a bit anti-climatically only to give herself away with a quiet snicker. It was followed by the disassembled cat head’s own rapturous deep laugh.

 

“Jeon Heejin, stop interrupting my interviews!” they heard Haseul’s complaint. She mulled over something for a second, then decided to ask for her borrowed camera back when she saw the clock behind the still goofing off friends. “Okay, I think that’s enough for the interview,” she concluded. She stole another glimpse at the hour hand and sighed. “Has anyone seen Yeojin?” she asked on her way out. She made a quick escape, hearing storm clouds when there were none. At least not yet as far as anyone else could tell.

 

In her absence, the bulky cat head was finally taken off. In its place was streaming hair daintily falling on a riveting face to whom all the wonders of the known millennium had seem to befallen. In response to this cascade, Heejin threw back her head, wiping the fallen hair from her turned-up nose sharp enough to cut the heart of onlookers. Carob downturned eyes resplendent enough to make any member of the team – no – any single person ogle. She could have been mistaken for an otherworldly fairy or a gracious model had it not been for her gamine guise, not to mention her stark, gravelly speech. “Let’s get out of here,” she said with her naturally imperial red and perfectly shaped lips that needed no scarlet lipstick or contouring. In the trendiest youth hangouts, beauties outnumbered mundane, but none so looked quite as foreign as Heejin. Deceptively so.

 

Knowing this, she threw on her street wear, an oversized off-yellow suede jacket, and led the way. She had spent hours rummaging through her closet to find this bit of color. Hyunjin followed suit, ever her faithful follower blocking other gazing eyes of the uniformly uninspiring masses with her height. She would have never guessed Heejin actually put effort into exuding her aura. Who was Heejin to dare to want to color the world this drastically anyways? Only someone who saw it as dull drivel, of course. She was the type to look at Hyunjin and see hot pink instead of a daffodil yellow. Same as how Hyunjin saw the unexplainable wolf silver of Heejin’s thin eyebrows instead of the lush winter blackness of her abundant hair.

 

Enough of this matter though. Graciously captivating Heejin aside, Hyunjin herself wasn’t immune to having a stray eye. They hadn’t gotten far when she stopped short, stooping down to play with a Russian blue. It was purple and blue in the evening lighting like the wolfsbane a new blonde friend of theirs from abroad so loved, and just as foreign. It was indeed pretty, albeit still a random street cat that could’ve been hostile for all she knew.

 

Heejin, hands in her pockets and a lollipop in her mouth, stood still listening to Hyunjin converse with it. Senseless babbling and meowing only them two could understand. There was a slight frown as she watched Hyunjin go too far aloof. Finding it hard to envision an older Hyunjin still acting like this, Heejin suddenly wondered what Hyunjin’s parents would have wanted for her all those years ago. Their dying wish for her. After all, life on Earth was oh so brief, and at high school age, they already had a foot in the grave. Perhaps this was humanity’s greatest feat. They lived gloriously, ever so fleetingly, leaving behind only their aspirations for the next generation. Just one look at Heejin and you could tell. Her perfectly groomed hair even as she shriveled away from anyone that tried to touch her scalp, her absolute lack of athletic abilities yet ability to stop anyone in their tracks with not just beauty. She was born to be loved, just as her mothers had so wished.

 

And Hyunjin? Running amuck in the dirt field day in and day out, never sticking to one sport. Preferring to conquer them all while Heejin rotated between her guitar lessons and vocal lessons as many aspiring artists their age did. Heejin preferred the company of music and people to listen to her songs, her art. Hyunjin preferred doing this: being the strange animal lover girl. Being free to be weird. So what exactly kept the two of them together? It was simple – Heejin had been there. From the second Hyunjin lost what mattered most in life all the way until now. But that remains a story etched in another book in black and white waiting to be recalled with painted color. Another day, not now.

 

For now, there was this Sunday sunlight still remaining. “Let’s go. Hold my hand,” Heejin ushered now as she did then.

 

Hyunjin stared back at her with firm wide eyes. “ _Aeong!_ ” she hissed seemingly asking why.

 

Heejin stomped on the ground, enlarging her own already round eyes in mock anger. “Because I said so!” She looked more like an angry tot than a commanding authoritarian. Nevertheless, Hyunjin bid her new animal friend farewell and took Heejin’s hand without another word or _aeong_ . On such notice, Heejin held her closer by the hand. “I’m worried about you, you know. What if one day _‘aeong’_ is all you say?” She continued on when Hyunjin naturally shrugged her off, “Good thing you still listen to me…half of the time.”

 

Suspicion flashing across Hyunjin’s pert mind. She threw down Heejin’s hand accusing, “Are you using your power on me right now?”

 

Hastier than Hyunjin, Heejin scooped her hand back up, squeezing it firmly against her face with both of her hands. “Why? Are you seeing vivid colors you haven’t ever seen before right now?” she challenged.

 

Hyunjin blinked once, had to look away away from Heejin’s intensity, and blinked again. “No,” she reciprocated sotto voce, barely audible. How sad it was she spent so much time so often staring blankly at Heejin just to be like this under her watch. She was still a child, still not brave enough because she had once had it all before losing it all.

 

“Oh,” Heejin let out just as softly. “Good,” she said unconvincingly. She let Hyunjin’s hand go. It lasted a couple seconds before she changed her mind, and held Hyunjin yet again.

 

Hyunjin, on her part, acted like nothing had transpired. Nothing to stir her alert yet simultaneously confuse her. Running from such thoughts, Hyunjin thought of the most practical solution. “Race you?” she ran ahead of Heejin, holding out of her open hand in invitation rather than taunt. Heejin took her up on it, smiling all the way even as she lost by block after block, knowing somewhere far at the end was Hyunjin slowly jogging backwards waiting forevermore. And so, she ran with her, filling herself with colors she could not yet name.

 

Across the sidewalk, a small-in-every-sense-but-too-loud-for-her-own-good small girl ran after a frog so big it might as well have been a toad. It’s slimy skin was the shade of sunrise, or was it sunset? Yeojin didn’t care. She jumped as it jumped, feeling completely in sync with the amphibian though unable to catch it. How could she? It was an animal only she could see. She was chasing after death itself and not aware she was doing so. It would be the last time she’d be seen near home for some time.

 

 

***

 

 

Jungeun sat with her broad shoulders stooped over on the tall tree stump. Once a thousand upon thousands of years old bristlecone pine, it had witnessed more than this ageless girl and her two companions combined. It lived on in death to tell such tales, still bearing the names of lovers long lost along with an engraving of the year 1858. But Jungeun didn’t care for such stories or history, she wanted action. Mid-spring breeze brushing against her ripped jeans and denim jacket, she pitied herself. She pulled her open jacket in closer over her morpho butterfly blue tee instead of buttoning up. With a loud voice and a small stick, she drew haphazardly in the dirt blacker than her hair, softened by a storm the likes of which mortals never knew. “Damn it, Yerim. Where are you?” she groaned, wondering why she was still alone in the clearing.

 

Busybody Yerim had probably gone off and become Choerry again, she figured, jabbing the sullied ground in annoyance. Maybe she would avoid her responsibilities here and go off on adventures across the mirror worlds too. If Yerim who hated fruits could take a bite out of a cherry, then why couldn’t the infamously tough Jungeun find a fruit of her own to let her take on some ridiculous name and transcend the dimensions? She thought to herself, bemoaning her own solitude. If only Jinsoul hadn’t left them for her quest. She had been mostly alone since her departure, not knowing if she had even arrived.

 

In loneliness there was chance for new acquaintanceship though, and very soon, Jungeun wasn’t so alone anymore. “Hello there!” a foghorn of a voice blared out to her. “I’m lost; do you know the way out?” the disembodied, rather grating voice of a child asked her.

 

Our wizened guardian of the forest didn’t have to think twice to know what had happened, but she did have to look down. A silly school-aged girl, barely taller than the tree stump, stared back up at her. She carried a frog spirit in her hands, unafraid of getting warts much less death. While her plain white dress was muddied, she herself seemed calm and curious. _Finally, a lost soul,_ Jungeun mused to herself. She jumped up and began leading the way. “Follow me.” It wasn’t sufficient to say she knew the forest well. She was it. Breathing in the oxygen provided by its wildlife, adding to the carbon dioxide expelled by its plant matter both living and dead, she was an embodiment of the unliving living. A girl in-between, but she wouldn’t let this be this newfound’s fate…as pestersome as she was.

 

“Sure a bleak day, huh? So what do you do around here for fun? You’re deliberately not answering me right? It’s okay! I’m used to talking to myself,” Yeojin went on along the lines of this for some time in rapid succession, needing no reply. Making things awkward for no reason, she slapped this stranger to her on the back. “I’m tired! Are you? Should we take a break? I guess not?” What to do when she whined like the youth she was? Hell would Jungeun know. For time immemorial she had been only in the company of two others, neither this bothersome, this talkative. Not even Yerim. “You know, I had a tree like this in my backyard once, before my sister cut it down,” Yeojin began another rant again without a single retortion from Jungeun.

 

Who knows how much time passed while this girl went on with her apricot-like way. She had a citrusy look to her, refreshingly young and already speaking of all manner of topics like a preserved fruit still retaining its color. Yeojin continued speaking in hues and Jungeun listened rather inconspicuously intently. Her thoroughly rouged face brightening, her well-drawn full crimson lips pursed in concentration more to Yeojin than the path she forged for them both. Her silent interest surpassed the false indifference required for her occupation. If you could call an otherworldly vanguard of sorts that. She was no talkative cicerone, though she was sure Yeojin would be perfect for the job. Jungeun was learning though that maybe non-silence wasn’t so bad after all. White noise? No, too peeving to be that. Mortal ramble was like the constant croaking of a million frogs in competition with each other. But it spoke of curiosity, of wonder, of shades that ebbed and flowed in ways the in-between could not for it was just that - caught in-between.

 

Conversely, growing in her discontent, Yeojin refused to be stuck here in the middle. “Are you sure this is the right way?” the kid questioned Jungeun again. Her keen nose matching Jungeun’s smelled something off. The density of the thicket was off. She was only going further into the mass of the greenery instead of out. With ears perked like Jungeun’s as well, but eyes more alert (albeit smaller), she caught sight of an owl loudly devouring its prey. Scrumptiously so, ready to regurgitate to its youth as Yeojin herself wanted to throw up. They were definitely further in than out.

 

“Yes, I’m sure!” Jungeun remained unbothered. If it had been Yeojin’s fate to pass on, she would’ve been met with the proposal of fruit by another instead of running into Jungeun to chaperon her back. Yet here Yeojin was. Sure of herself, or overconfident rather, Jungeun swung her stick back to point in a direction just past the owl. In doing so, she accidentally scraped her own face, causing a single drop of blood to fall. It was a brightest lipstick shade of red.

 

“Are you okay?” Yeojin instinctively got on her tippy toes to touch her face.

 

The second she did so, one of Jungeun’s eyes gleemed hauntingly red around the iris. Her hair morphing instantaneously from death black to living blonde as the winds picked up, breathing life into it. Breathing life into Jungeun so she may see in colors of the living once more. She was no longer Jungeun, but Kim Lip. An identity she had assumed only once before. One she had no memory of...that is until she took one look at Yeojin and remembered another.

 

***

 

What was it like to look in the face of someone on the daily and recall the past life of another? Yves knew. And for that reason she staunchly opposed Chuu and Gowon’s proposal. “No. We’re not taking Olivia to Hong Kong with us and that’s final.” In her leather jacket, identical to Haseul’s only much more antique, and standing at a head or two above her height, Yves could be menacing. In appearance more than words. Her ovular face combined with her slim nose and genial eyes and lips did not exactly strike one with fear. Alternatively, her firm, dark as burgundy determination in contrast to her swan-like figure especially in Eden’s choice of bold checkered uniforms, made her out to be an outstanding model of authority.

 

Sprawled out across her on the spacious Victorian camelback sofa, Chuu lifted her head from Yves’s lap and sat up winning. “But you said it yourself that Olivia Hye isn’t Hyejoo anymore!” she said in the absent girl’s defense. Of the countless splendors of the Hungarian-esque castle they resided in brimming with antiquity, none of it was as lively as Chuu. The entire forest brimming with unliving not as animated as her. She spoke with a quite cute acute voice bordering on clarion when invigorated. With a voice like that accompanied by the face and persona of a rambunctiously adorable squishy-cheeked child, who could resist her? Except Yves. She held the peachy girl by the wrists and placed her hands down on her own lap. A final wordless _no_.

 

“Maybe she’s right. Olivia is still Hyejoo even if she doesn’t remember it.” Gowon, looking on from the other end of the couch spoke with portent in an adenoidal though crunchy tone. This portent being an omen or of still unseen marvel was yet to be determined. Chuu and Yves’s conflicting options aside, Gowon made the best points. Though they all wore the same mustard plaid skirt and matching solid yellow blazer, they wore them differently. On Yves, a uniform designed to be thick and rigid somehow accentuated the fine curvature of her thin body as if acknowledging her rebel cause. Her leather jacket that she had slipped on in lieu of her mandatory coat in addition to her dirtied knee-high socks proved just this. On Chuu, the clothes seemed oversized, making her a child growing into clothes she was not yet acquainted to. Just as she struggled still with their daily moral lessons best she tried or not. On Gowon, well, they were perfect. Much like Gowon aspired to be.

 

And what about on this debated Olivia? She pushed through the ornate wooden doors also in her perfectly form-fitting uniform that she wore in accordance with regulation only to be met with immediate silence. A silence stronger than death. And the four of them had known that silence personally. Her curtains of black hair covered her protruding, ever-pouting lips. Covering her entire sullen once-pearly face except for her nose sticking out like a wolf’s snout. She herself was the lonewolf, caped in solidarity, draped in furs of silver rigidness with the innermost yearning for touch. A wolf pup with darling eyes watery from exhaustion of calling out for someone in the silence, anyone, and never getting an answer in reply. Thus resorting to a vow of reticence herself.

 

“We should go,” Yves ignored her presence to lay down the law. Her will, once more. She was the first of the women after all. Who could deny her fruits? Her bidding was a gift, her favor paramount. “Follow me closely or you’ll get lost.” She took Chuu’s hand and made off with her, giving Chuu only enough time to bid the briefest of farewells to Olivia on her way out. The sun was quickly setting and they still had an entire forest to navigate through to get to the fruit tree.

 

“I’ll join you two later,” Gowon called after them, not needing to be heard. She was not Yves’s _co._ She couldn’t exert total control over her, be it as it may that it was Gowon’s own counterpart they had gone to find. The only searching Gowon wanted to do was her own. Exactly where did she put her little mirror?

 

Olivia took up the spot next to her tranqually. She sat motionless, emotionless until a full minute later would she speak in her usual monotone undertone so similar yet so different to Gowon’s small autotuned voice. “How shallow is it to fall in love with your own _co_ ,” she said rather than questioned. She had meant it to be menacing, piering. Though if one did not know her, they would think it was no more than a passing comment. “What’s so important about finding this other you anyways?”

 

Gowon, brushing the hair back from her round forehead, stopped applying lipstick on her pointed lips.  They were soft, thin lips that formed an awkwardly angular smile precise opposite of Olivia’s downturned triangular mouth. She let out an airy chuckle of sorts, smiling graciously for the youngin of the bunch. The youngling with dread forever memorialized by their immortal lives. “You wouldn’t understand unless you found your own. It’s not another you,” she loosely quoted. “It is you. But through a lopsided mirror or something of the sort. To be honest, I don’t get it myself either. That’s why I’m still here. Better to be the one and only, you know? It’s better to be happy by yourself when the sun falls asleep than chasing after a shadow of yourself on earth,” she said cryptically.

 

Olivia’s head hurt trying to make sense of it, so she stopped. Better to be left out then further her confusion. Her existence as Olivia Hye had already baffling enough. How was she to also deal with this blue shadow Gowon kept seeing in her dreams? This entrapped streak of color forming a person she had enlisted the first two among them to find, would she be to Gowon what Yves was to Chuu? Olivia shook her head in disdain and sunk deeply into the cushioning. (She was glad Teacher was nowhere nearby to reprimand her - not that she ever let her down before.) She could never picture the everproud Gowon taking cues from another, entwining her will with someone not her own. She was a princess in another life, still as she is now. “What’s it like? Being able to remember your past?” she questioned with the sincerity of a patient with the most severe amnesia.

 

“Oh, it’s great! Remembering how I used to have millions of subjects cowering below me only to be here having to dress myself up all alone for no one to see. And above all, still thinking of my frozen body, slowly deteriorating next to my crashed plane before the irresistible Goddess of Eden approached me with her eternal fruit. Seeing my golden crown of jewels replaced by pineapple crowns. Yeah. It’s great.” She dabbed at the end.

 

By all that was holy in Eden, and all that was unholy in the in-between, _god_ was Gowon snappily sarcastic in the most quiet and smooth of voices. She was in such foul humor, a sarcastic formerly pampered brat. And Olivia loved it. She smiled with half her mouth then let it sag down back into its usual sunken shape coming across a stray thought. “I think Yves and I must have been enemies in one of our human lives. Rival generals and I slaughtered her first with my awesome sword skills leaving behind her young widow. And that’s why she’s older than me here and Chuu is her match made in Eden. While I’m younger ‘cause I kept living my badass life until she came to collect me in death and made me miserable for an infinity here,” she went off expounding her theory while toying with Gowon’s spare hand, tracing little circular moons in it.

 

Gowon listened intently just to laugh at the end. “What are you saying even?” It was true that try as one may, it seemed implausible to be able to resist the fruits of Yves. Though an enemy in life and afterlife for all of time did seem rather harsh. Hyejoo as she remembered was darkly witty but never cold enough to be a mass murderer with vengeance her greatest sin. “I think you’ve been watching too many old Earthly movies,” she chided.

 

Speaking of such, Olivia cracked a smile. “Say the line again,” she dared to order a princess.

 

Her request was soon met with willingness to entertain. She found small hands cupping her face, a face feigning sincerity met her eye to eye. “And some day, when you die, I'll be the one who puts you in the ground,” Gowon recited this night too. It was their little game, finding the most ancient of human videos to watch and learn as if they were love ballads of old. How silly humans were, they’d laugh, not at all understanding such footage. Though very much liking how they sounded resurrecting memories and loves that had gone cold. As she spoke, the moon was illuminating the sky like stage lighting causing Olivia to hold herself because Gowon wouldn’t take the cue to.

 

Ready to call it for the night, Olivia got up stretching. Unsatisfied, she glared now at Gowon with reddened weary eyes in mock angst. “Sorry I don't treat you like you're perfect like all your little royal subjects used to do,” she apologized in advance for what she was about to do, making a small amendment of her own, and took Gowon in her arms. Gowon was a paper doll in her embrace. Amidst the princess’s short-lived protests, she held her bridal-style for seconds before swinging her horizontally round and round her waist until both were rosy with laughter. Only then did she remember Gowon’s thorny crown headband that had pricked her hand. Carelessly wiping her injured hand on her side, she threw Gowon down on the seat, causing more ruckus-filled laughter.

 

Hovering over her with their heads facing opposite directions, she too now noticed the curvature of their perfectly opposite lips. She wondered how it would feel to hold Gowon’s round chin as oppose to her own chin that was only less sharp than Yves’s. Eden’s inhibitions forgotten, she did as she so wished, holding Gowon’s face, watching her round eyes flash with light, a wide space with countless shooting stars. “Your lips,” she started tracing them with two fingers that rose and dropped with Gowon’s stunned slowing breath. “Are so crooked!” she teased and hopped off snickering to herself.

 

Gowon laid speechless, feeling unjust when she finally processed Olivia’s joke on her. She frowned as she often saw Chuu do, puckering her lips. Had it been the likes of Yves or Chuu to do this to her, she would’ve pushed them off without a second thought then brushed herself free of their peasant presence. But with Olivia, she would get square with her. “So mature,” she said with emotions unreadable, wanting to start a cold treatment on Olivia had she not already run out the door, merrily jiggling and bouncing her way out.

 

She would have made it to her room and slept so soundly that night had fate not dictated otherwise, forging her a new path among the memories of yesteryears. One room from hers was Yves's. She stopped before it, seeing a faint red light pulsating from within. Unable to contain her curiosity, she entered seeing at once the source of light. It was a closet, the one where Yves kept her not-so-meticulously groomed uniforms and her so meticulously hidden clothes for her Earthly adventurings. Had Yves not taken her leather jacket that she would use to wrap up a certain cube in her wardrobe, had Olivia not stayed awake and came wandering back to bed a minute later than usual, had Gowon not looked at her so attentively for seconds longer than she usually permitted herself, she wouldn’t have seen it.

 

It was a single devilishly glowing wooden cube, forged from Middle Forrest wood, encapsulating what? Olivia wanted to find out. She would be Pandora. Resistance was made obsolete by curiosity’s butterfly. Olivia’s heart furried, her hands drifting to the cube on a pastel breeze. Inches from it, she looked in the mirror and saw not herself. In place of her reflection, she saw Yves, Chuu, and Gowon’s uncaringly looking back. Raging grey misery, she snatched the object of her desire from hence it lied feeling an instant illumination burning her. Bursts of pink hair whipped across her face, followed by splashes of hot blood. She shook in place, recalling Gowon calling her by her name. But another one. One she had long been forced to forget in exchange for her place here in this place disguised as a heaven.

 

As vivid as Gowon’s voice and peaceful silhouette appeared to her, it vanished, whooshed away on a deer-shaped light. In her place, a pink haired shadow steadily growing larger in the mirror paced toward her. Fearless Olivia now had nothing save fear. It permeated her entire core in sweat. She sought her breath but was met with an offer instead. A fruit plump and bloody-colored, the epitome of what the green apple Yves had given her so many years ago was not, was offered to her by two cradling gaunt hands. “Hyejoo,” the sweet mechanical voice whispered, slowly, captivatingly. “Remember.”

 

Olivia cleared her throat, extending her hand. Trembling fingers betraying her show of bravery, she envisioned a world in which she was the most knowledgeable, one in which Yves and Chuu wouldn’t cease talking upon her arrival and Gowon would...Gowon would… She didn’t know how to finish that. She was still processing it all, but she wanted it. Wanted the comfort, power, transcendence of knowledge that had been stripped of her. It was all millimeters away.

 

“Don’t!” another crisp voice urgently called her through the mirror. She saw a glimpse of purple then no more.

 

***

 

**_Random Short Side Story 1:_ **

 

Chuu stuck her camera a bit closer to that perfect face that pictures just wouldn’t do justice. What better than a close up? How about an in-depth examination of what made Yves seem to glow? The closest shots zooming in on her poreless porcelain skin. It was strange as heck, she’d admit that. What did Yves care though? She still had some complicated book shoved up her nose, what more was an oversized camera zoom lense?

 

As if Chuu’s dreams had all materialized, Yves put her book down, smilingly charmingly for her. “Finished your chapter?” Chuu perked.

 

“No, just taking a break. Aren’t you tired of holding that all day?” she was motioning for her to put her camera down. It was thrown aside without another thought. In its place, was Yves’s long slender fingers holding onto Chuu’s. “You look like you could use a ramen break,” she suggested insatiably.

 

Chuu’s heart nearly burst. “I-”

 

“Unnie!” She was interrupted. “I can’t find one of my shoes that I kicked under my bed so I’m taking yours. ‘Kay? Thanks!” Olivia popped her head in to say and dashed out.

 

“Hyejooooo!!!” Chuu screeched, being awaken by this rude youngster from her happiest of dreams.

 

“It’s Olivia Hye,” Olivia poked her head back into Chuu’s bedroom to correct her.

 

That night, Chuu stayed up tossing and turning, cursing,”Stupid, Hyejoo!”

 

Waking up in a cold sweat, Olivia muttered in a small font voice, “Olivia Hye!” and fell back asleep.

 

 

 

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading this chapter of _#LoonaverseTale_ and please do help me share and promo the story if you like it ^^ You can lmk what you think and leave comments/suggestions here or on my Twitter [@12butterflymoon](twitter.com/12butterflymoon). You can also read [_here on AFF_](https://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/1399356/a-loonaverse-tale) instead~ **

**Tbh I hate the beginning but I wanted to start simple then make things more fantastical and complex as we got along to fit in with us starting on Earth and ending up in Eden. Please do give your response and lmk any questions you might have ^^ This is just be my own interpretation of the Loonaverse but I too am very confused still. I also haven't written in a while so things will be rough and not my best writing at first. Will try to edit this later but we’ll see.**

 

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She looked at the shade that wasn’t quite red nor pink. “What do humans call this color?" she wanted to know.

 

“Love letter,” Vivi read.

 

“Oh, that’s cute,” she smiled, dancing around with the bucket of paint.

 

Vivi, being assembled in Hong Kong, naturally had a predilection for sweetness. Jinsoul though was diabetic-inducing, diabolically sweet in personality and preferences alike.

 

“I’m just your problem.”

 

“Kill me.”

 

“I would, but you’re not alive.”

 

“Are you lost? What’s your name?”

 

“I’m Ch-ch…ji..” she couldn’t seem to remember and at last answered, “Jiwoo.”


	2. Names to Be Remembered By

  **Chapter 2**   _in which Yves arrives in Hong Kong alone in deep thought having lost Chuu, some time later Jinsoul and Vivi share a moment, Heejin gives us inklings of her past with Hyunjin and their current feelings, Haseul finds someone while abroad_

* * *

 

 

She sat in the moving vehicle dressed in silenced, dyed with the lack of color. Yves sighed, alone and drifting. The crowded grey buildings, the cluttered urban scenery, the crappy outdated taxis of Hong Kong were much like she remembered from twelve years ago. Only more rustic, missing the personal touches and newness of quintessential life and quondam companionship. She had been there, yet never been there. A past better unwritten.

 

“I’m just your problem, aren’t I?” Hyejoo had once vocalized in her voice so low, Yves fought the rain-filled wind to hear her. Cased in bloodied clothes, her eyes seemed to radiate rippling ruby red. It was the mark of a beastly murderer masking the arrogant yet shy humanity that was so characteristic of her. This novel stubborn Hyejoo wouldn’t cower, even in admittance of error. Was she wrong though to do what she had done?

 

Yves looked at Hyejoo with the disdain of a mortal enemy though neither of them were mortal nor moral. The moisture in the air and pellets muddying both of their faces couldn’t ease the dryness of her throat so heated by fire. “Why did you have to go after her? Why did you have to ki-” How could she finish, admitting to a sin they both partook in one way or another?

 

“You know as well as I do that she was never human to start with. We can’t make human life, you fool,” she called her for what she was in place of the names of divinity given to her. There was nothing sacred between them, not anymore. They weren’t angels. They were fiends who could only make materializations of their innermost demon. “Look what she did,” the younger Hyejoo cladded in her signature leather jacket, with a choker of a necklace laced around her neck began. Her hand wasted no time in snapping the said accessory off. It was her accessory to a crime, formerly covering her lacerated neck.

 

Refusing to look, to admit, she fought her with words so caring for another that they were utterly uncaring to Olivia’s own grief. Yves persisted, “Still! She was...all my life. Even if you still had a pulsating heart, you wouldn’t understand!” Looking past Hyejoo, into the glass windows of stores in the distance, Yves saw a younger face of herself in the mirror. She asked herself who she was to allow for such mistakes, one after the other, and the cold breeze of the early morning forced her to recognize her own face then as it was now. Shallow as the consumerism that defined this urban metropolis, stalky as what remained of someone she used to escape Eden for. Someone who waited to be reassembled by her stained hands. “What would you know about living anyways,” she added her final blow, her mind skating in circles all alone now. She had once maneuvered past all obstacles to come here to skate rounds with her. Now those days would be no more. What was a rink without a partner, an admirer, a lover. If she could bring back to life all the now extinct men who so long ago once roamed this miserable planet just to sacrifice them once more for her single creation to come back to life, she would. With no hesitation.   

 

Grief was only as strong as its bearer, and both Yves and Hyejoo alike were too staggeringly strong for their own goods. That day though, Hyejoo was ready to submit, to relinquish the unending life she had come to know. She took Yves's hand and raised it to her ashen face. An eye for an eye, a life for another. It didn’t take the false scruples of their supposed paradise to know the rules both goddesses and women alike abided by. “Kill me.”

 

The voiceless reply came to her. “I would, but you’re not alive. Just like all of us, all of us except these senseless mortals here that can’t even sense our presence.” Yves wanted to curse them out. Blame them for being so jovially oblivious that she had wanted to give up her all-knowingness in exchange for their fruitful fruitlessness. She had once consumed countless apples to spend a million and one nights with them, going so far as creating a _‘human’_ of her own. Was it a sin to want the pleasures of Earth? What was Eden if it couldn’t surpass the entrapping of humanness?

 

“Then undo me. Make me someone else, like how you shed your former self,” was Hyejoo’s last request those dozen years ago.

 

Looking back for the last time that night, Yves so wished that she hadn’t taken Hyejoo’s jacket from her. She should’ve at least left her with that final piece of her old self. The look of Olivia when they both opened their eyes anew was so bright; they both dared not approach each other. For the shortest of seconds, her heart wanted to be like Olivia. To be colored and filled anew. Coming to a silent mutual agreement, they willingly approached the sun together, limping as they did so. They had spent a night fighting a battle like humans would never know, cutting down entire forests left and right. Now, with all the haunting memories of these events while dragging along a newly formed Olivia with no memories at all, Yves struggled, wanting to fall into a final eternal slumber devoid of all life. Until Chuu ran up to them both. Embracing Yves before she asked what had happened, she helped her carry Olivia not yet knowing she was Hyejoo no longer. “What happened? What did you do to Hyejoo?”

 

“I made her into something…something _new_.”

 

Chuu, on her part, smelt the flapping of the burnt wings, holding Yves’s miserable appearance in her hands, and disregarded it. “Let’s go. You two can both use some rest,” she smiled to her, astutely sensible as always. There was a hint of joy on her face perhaps as the lights on the stage drifted apart. Sunshine shined once more, having been regurgitated by she whom had swallowed it. Brighter than this rebirthed sun, there was Chuu in this new center stage, spotlight on her, lifting Yves up from her worldly dreads. And things were shining once more, blooming like sweet seduction.

 

Having had found insurmountable solace in this bright allurement, the Yves of today who had long fallen for the connoisseur of fallen angels of years past, left her cab in haste. Her footsteps were purposeful, and hard. She threw down the leather jacket that had once belonged to a sister turned nemesis then a confused child she had concocted. Amidst the night market’s far from barren streets, among the tourists scrambling about for treats, she began her solo dance. Graceful as she was lonely. What was Eve without her fruit, oh so sweet? Could Chuu find her among this human mess of a world? She should have held her hand. She didn’t want to find anyone except her, to take anyone back to that place that wasn’t heaven but was their eden but her. In a place of millions, there was nobody but Chuu. Just where was she though?

 

 

***

**Years after Yeojin's Disappearance**

 

How quaint this overstuffed stationary store underground was. Art supplies laid precariously stacked on each other, cramped between journals and boxes of crayons, markers and the like. It was here that with eyes of azure, transparent as glass, Jinsoul pulled out exactly what she needed for her project. She looked at the shade that wasn’t quite red nor pink. “What do humans call this color?" she wanted to know. Her soft words with wonder permeating their every pitch and flow could even touch an inorganic being, enlivening it.

 

“Love letter,” Vivi read. She was proud to be of help, feeling like a playmate rather than a chaperone for her younger human friends for once.

 

“Oh, that’s cute,” Jinsoul smiled, dancing around with the tiny bucket of paint. “Can we buy it for my Gundam? Please, Vivi, please!” Jinsoul, having perhaps literally dropped from the sky, had no money of her own. Besides, how could someone without so much as a last name and no paperwork of her identity go about acquiring a reputable job in a place like Hong Kong? She was as invisible as the robot Vivi was, at least on paper. In person, she was a sight to behold, and true to the origins of her one singular name, she was a local ‘legend’ and a soft-spoken ‘goddess’ to behold. She possessed a gentle beauty that even Heejin couldn’t match. A tenderness one felt from a single look, and then another, because how could one only gaze at such a sight only once?

 

Vivi, being assembled in Hong Kong, naturally had a predilection for sweetness. Jinsoul though was diabetic-inducing, diabolically sweet in personality and preferences alike. It was impossible to turn her down. “Ah, I don’t know. Haseul will probably scold me again for supporting your over the top Gundam hobby when she gets back,” she hesitated falsely, having already pulled out her wallet for Jinsoul. “This will be the last time though,” she mimicked a stern parent yet was met with laughter.

 

“Whatever you say,” Jinsoul hooted, wrapping her free arm around Vivi’s. Her height stood out against Vivi’s shorter stature, her hair straight where Vivi’s curved and curled, her long dress fluttered in the wind the way Vivi’s tucked in blouse would not. What a scene they were among the black haired population. A pinked haired robot escorting an almost foreign blonde girl from nowhere.

 

“I’m an android,” the human-like Vivi in all manners except speech and the slot on her back to plug her in corrected, reading Jinsoul’s mind. Her doey eyes and apple hair with her angular, v-shaped face made her a gentle looking model instead of a threatening machine. She could still pack quite the bite though. Don’t do the dishes and the next day you won’t have none. Dare ask Jinsoul about the scar between her brows that she often tried to cover up and you’d wish you’d never asked.

 

Then, there was this other side of her, the side that could never forget any detail of any year, day, second long past because she had be programed to be able to recall it all. That was to say, she could recall Jinsoul’s first appearance to a degree Jinsoul could never. “What brought you here?” Vivi had once asked her, bringing her to the light, taking her out of her soaked white and blue uniform. She had cared for her like the most caring of mother or lover would, drying her impossibly long hair, redrawing on her fine eyebrows, tracing her thin lips. Vivi had watched shamelessly as the towel fell from her fine tall body. For non-humans knew not of shame. Only admiration, hunger, fear, and sadness.

 

“The sin of swallowing up the afternoon sun. The sin of swallowing up all the stars in the sky,” Jinsoul then muttered more macabrely than Vivi would ever hear her speak again. No, it was rather like she was singing in the rain, with a voice so distinct it punctured Vivi’s memory box, causing her to take special note. Jinsoul, unlike Olivia, would not go on to completely forget be it may that the filth of the human world would cloud her mind. It was the pain of remembering that kept her eyes blue with purpose.

 

But that Jinsoul was nothing like today’s Jinsoul. Our modern day Jinsoul grinned, thinking of compliments in her mind for Vivi, calling her ‘baby’ this and ‘cutie’ that, to see a robot blush with a tint more intense than this newfound love letter. How fun the mortal world could be, she thought to herself. With all its colors and beings, animate and semi-animate. She flushed with animation, feeling so amazingly alive for the first time in an eternity since the colorless days of the in-between. Being let out, finding her way to the aquarium had been worth the time stuck in the basement, she justified. That was where she was wrong. Earth was no Eden, just as Eden was no Earth. Then again, perhaps both were mere names of equally miserable places. “What’s the matter?” she asked Vivi who had stopped walking.

 

Vivi clutched the leather jacket she picked up from the intersection close to where her heart once beat for her non-human creator, saying nothing. 

 

***

 

She said nothing to her, only clutching her pencil tight, solving the puzzle at the speed of light. Faster than a heartbeat, and she was done. Hyunjin wanted to applaud her for completing the sudoku puzzle in less than half the average human speed. Under three minutes instead of the average five to ten. Instead, she said, “Nerd,” waited for Heejin to shoot her laser eyes more vibrant than Vivi’s hair, then added, “hurry and eat your breakfast. It’s so late now; it might as well be brunch.”

 

Wordlessly, Heejin scooped up the rice porridge that was closer to gruel than guk begrudgingly. She hated the fevers she had in spring while others had spring fever. She should be out admiring the short-lived blushing cherry blossoms, not starring at the fake forest green succulents they had in their dorm. If only she could be untouched by pollen like Vivi or seemingly inhumanly immune to all disease like Jinsoul. _The only disease Jinsoul could catch is love-sickness_ , Heejin had one said to Hyunjin only to have her scoff at her over analyzation, or rather speculation in her eyes.

 

Pouting, she flipped the so-called extreme level sudoku she had printed out over to the blank side and started sketching meticulously. Her hope was in doing so, she’d stop noticing the tasteless goop she was being forced to consume. It was only when she got to the eyes, wide and curious yet unmarked, was she marked by realization. She hastily covered the illustration with one hand. She was not fast enough, having been caught red-handed.

 

“Are you drawing me like one of your French girls again?” Hyunjin quipped, putting down her cat mug, smirking a winner’s smirk.

 

“Y-yeah,” came Heejin’s stuttering honest acknowledgment. “Here,” she passed it over to Hyunjin’s direction, with forged dismissiveness.   

 

Hyunjin bit her lips to stop her ever encroaching smile. “Can I take a picture and send it to the girls? It’s really good,” she gave in and beamed. She was ever so polite with Heejin only when she was flattered or touched.

 

Sticking the pencil behind her ear and posing with her hand as a ‘v’ under her chin, the self-proclaimed brilliant artist Heejin said, “Yeah, sure. Je m'appelle artiste Heejin!” She was proud of herself. Fleetingly so, before her insecurities as a perfectionist daunted her. She thought about taking the drawing away from Hyunjin momentarily then stopped herself, already knowing what she would say. _There’s already plenty of color._

 

Twelve months ago, had it not been a nipping Paris cold that winter in contrast with their suffocatingly toasty room overlooking the city, Heejin would have kept the windows locked shut. Paris was as overcrowded and overrated as Hong Kong. Made out to be artistic and vibrant where it was unwelcoming and deteriorating from the inside out, Heejin once thought. Even the air outside often felt clogged up, made smoggy and impure by the millions trampling their so-called art. But Heejin couldn’t breathe another breath of this stifling indoor air whose silence smothered her and her companion Hyunjin alike. This was supposed to be a fun getaway, a trip abroad to Heejin’s former abode to help Hyunjin forget those who had left her. Yet, Hyunjin remained stagnate, quiet in her sorrow in this City of Love just as she was soulless in Seoul, the City of Souls.   

 

“Wow, look at that. The Eiffel Tower light show is on!” Heejin overenthusiastically piped to no effect. A single glance over at Hyujin praying she wouldn’t reply with a single _‘aeong’_ had Heejin sighing. “It’s not even that colorful,” she admitted her truest thought. Her favorite bustling bursting-with-color place in the world rendered void by a touch of Hyunjin’s dark dreary. Leave it to Hyunjin to be a mourning cat year after year, that same time of year. At least that much was constant for the otherwise spontaneous girl. Even now Heejin didn’t quite get it. Who could let grief touch them so everlasting? Would this be a love that Heejin would aspire for? This eternal memory. It was too much for the younger her that day. Not even the foreignness of Heejin’s home away from home would rosy her lackluster hues that day.

 

That was until Hyunjin got up from the bed she had made her new second home that fateful trip. “There’s already plenty of color,” she said with newborn eyes of admiration. It was the most she had said in a long time since this year’s anniversary of the person formerly most important to her passing. There was plenty of beauty left after death, she reminded herself, staring out before looking back.

 

Heejin too saw the world with these new colors, walking precariously as if in a dream to hug Hyunjin from behind. “I guess you’re right. It’s all here.”

 

***

 

One, two, three…and four! Haseul recounted with a mother’s fretful carefulness. She wouldn’t be caught coming home from her Europe trip with one present short for her closest friends/roommates. Shuffling the present boxes around, making a clumsy Santa of herself, she lost a feather from nowhere in the process and didn’t notice. She wished she knew how to ask for a big bag in French, or was that not a thing here? She should’ve asked Heejin, but she couldn’t risk her teasing her for her troubles. She had at one time made fun of Heejin for her bad French and even now she didn’t think she could take it back. Speaking of taking it back, she should hurry home with the swirling wind depositing banks of swan white snow faster than she could walk.

 

She strutted with purpose, feeling more adult than ever in her heels and Western red, white, and blue dress, fit for Christmas. Unable to see directly below her however, she almost tripped when a giant rock was dislodged by her step. Only it wasn’t a rock. It was a human caped in red and washed out by the translucent color of icicles.

 

“Ouch,” the figure grumbled, waking from her magnificent dream of apples and strawberries, dissimilar lovers, and a Canon EOS 550.

 

Hastily helping her up, Haseul checked her temperature to find her surprisingly warm to the touch. “Are you okay? Are you lost? What’s your name?”

 

“Ch-ch…ji..” She wanted to say her name, wanted to say she was cold, but her chattering teeth gave out along with her memories of a paradise for two far from here. She couldn’t seem to remember anymore and at last answered, “Jiwoo,” with a sneeze. Her last strand of memory came to her then, newer than a new love. “I-I need to find Yv-yv…eve..” she said only to forget as the words left her.

 

“Eevvee?” Haseul tried to piece together for her. “Did you get lost playing Pokémon Go?”

 

 

*** 

 

**_Random Short Side Story 2:_ **

 

“You can both sit down,” the interviewer motioned the two young women to their respective seats in front of a plain white background. One sat down gracefully stroking her hair while the other hesitantly sat precociously with eyes wide like a cat.

 

“So tell me your names.”

 

“I’m Princess Gown, first of her name,” came the regal answer.

 

“I’m Aeong-” she looked to Heejin behind the camera, reading her angry lips. “I mean, Hyunjin!”

 

“Um, okay,” the interviewer scratched her head. Not exactly the start she was looking for. “Next question: do you have any catch phrases or something you say often nowadays?”

 

Gowon raised her hand daintily to answer first. “I often say _‘assa’_ when I win something or beat everyone else at something. Which is often.”

 

There was silence. “And you, Hyunjin?” the interviewer prodded her on when she missed all cues to answer next.

 

“Aeong!” she nodded once firmly, then fell silent again.

 

“Um..”

 

“She means _‘aeong’_ is her catch phrase! It can be used to express a lot of different emotions,” Heejin explain for her, whispering to the struggling journalist.

 

“Ah, I see.”

 

“Aeong.”

 

“Can I take a powder break yet, human peasant? I mean, Ms. Interviewer?”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 **A/N: Thanks for reading this chapter of** **_#LoonaverseTale_ ** **and please do help me share and promote the story ^^ You can lmk what you think and leave comments/suggestions here or on my Twitter[@12butterflymoon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18523666/chapters/twitter.com/12butterflymoon). You can also read [ _here on AFF_](https://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/1399356/a-loonaverse-tale) instead~ **

**I really get encouraged to write by comments so please do leave your input! And I will try to edit and add on details to this shorter chapter later!**

 

**_Next Chapter Previews (in no particular order):_ **

****

“Who is Jo Haseul to you?” she demanded to know.

 

What was Eden without Olivia? Gowon was only starting to find out. She hated every millisecond of it.

 

“Everyone, meet my new friend Jiwoo!”

 

“What are we? A charity home? We can’t keep taking in strays.”

 

“Do you remember me?”


	3. Love, Time and Time Again

**Chapter 3**   _in which Hyunjin isn't just simply sick, Gowon recalls memories that have her running after Olivia, Olivia finds herself with an old friend, Kim Lip discovers more than she intended with Yeojin, a reunion happens though not as any of the girls would expect_

* * *

 

 

**_Now on Earth, Year 2112_ **

 

She had awoken to a concerned though chipper mostly recovered Heejin and found herself coughing up volumes in her stead. Everything was on fire from her forehead to her toes. It was the price she had to pay for looking after her sick friend. “Get down and sit on my bed. I’ll go heat you up some guk,” Hyunjin heard the muffled voice through one ringing ear not still pressed to her pillow. She wanted to limply protest afraid the kitchen would burn. She reached out a hand only to have it drop as if the life from it had been snapped to give animation to Heejin’s renewed health. Having no one to help her out of bed from her top bunk in one of the double bunkbeds cramped into their hobbit of a bedroom shared by four, Hyunjin groaned. Their generous sized (for Hong Kong) flat with its own kitchen and sofa embellished living room had to give somewhere. And that’s where Hyunjin felt it most, bumping her tall head on the low ceiling every morning. If Heejin didn’t so love the ease of being about to slide out of bed without a climb, maybe things would be different. But no. Here was Hyunjin’s eternal struggle for her sake. She was sick for her, because of her.

 

 

The former sickly patient’s caretaker grumbled some more over their sudden role reversal. Her complaints wouldn’t last long. Her remaining skepticism of Heejin’s sudden eager to help dissolved with a glance at her phone. Seeing the date, she fumbled out of bed gingerly, retrieving an old well-kept photobook from her drawer, and plopped down on her roomie’s bottom bunk. Flipped to the page housing the photo she had adoringly adorned with a cat and dog bookmark, she looked long at hard at what had been her family. Once a content unit of three, brimming with joy post a school play. Little Hyunjin with her short hair and decorative theater hat of a dozen-colored feathers vibrant as ever in between her moms simply dressed in nearly matching dresses. They patted her hair more tenderly than she stroke her cat’s fur, as if knowing it would be a final memento. Remembering her tech savvy friend’s new favorite app, she took a picture of this photo, asking her to re-digitize it into high quality. It had been the highest of times for her, a quality of life undefinable by material wealth rather by the fortune of being so beloved. She would let a tear drop had it not been for the towering goof running into the room to smother her.

 

 

“Hyunjin, baby, are you okay?” Jinsoul locked her in her embrace. Usually, it was a cat who would go and catch fish with a ferocity unmatched. In this case, it was an overly affectionate fish that would startle the scary cat with fondness unmatched. Had Hyunjin the strength or effort to tergiversate, turning her back on Jinsoul, the latter would surely guddle her like she was the fish. Fishing her out of her self-imposed stone cave along the riverbank.

 

 

“Aeong.”

 

 

Hyunjin lacked the power to stop her. Sick as she was, she just wasn’t sick of Jinsoul. What a change up from Heejin who would extend both hands out as if to hug her then slap her on the back, or make half a heart hand then change it the moment Hyunjin went to match her pose for a picture. Not being able to picture such affection from Hyunjin, she on this rare occasion let her mind slip, picturing instead nights roaming the Japanese streets with her parents looking for yummy eats. The colors of the streetlights catching her eyes, causing her to dance along merrily to her own tune. Afternoons spent being taught how to properly use chopsticks or how to properly treat animal friends with her moms holding her hands. They were big warm hands, warmer than Jinsoul’s touch. Mornings contemplating which store-bought snack to munch on because neither of her parents were amazing cooks. It was a house with foods for comfort unparalleled, more than one could name if they had been asked during a quiz. It was a house were cats stayed warm and docile as their owners, bathed in attention and affection. A house of loving memories. That is, until the storm. The Great Storm that took down millions of trees and lives with it, and the following grief that would change it all.

 

 

Instead of finding herself crying, struggling to ease herself, Hyunjin found Jinsoul nuzzled against her neck. Her whole body rested against her, yet supported her with an arm around her waist, and another to her face. She was caressing her with more pliancy than a much younger Hyunjin capturing her sensitive runaway cat, waiting for her mom to come back to her. Waiting a long time until she could wait no longer.

 

 

It was like this that Heejin found the two intimately close in a swirl of Hyunjin’s yellow patterned pajamas with Jinsoul’s blue betta ones entirely wrapped around her. They were a set of custom in ear monitors, the left being a different color from the right, though still entwined as a pair nonetheless. Finding a nonexistent spec of sand in her own eye at the sight, Heejin agitatedly quite literally banged on pots and pans to separate them. “Jinsoul, get your ass up and help me in the kitchen! There may be gas leaking.”

 

 

“What?!” Jinsoul ran after her, leaving our sickly Hyunjin to cradle her bread cushion. She had thrown down at Heejin in the middle of the night for snoring. She now held it close, taking in what she could of Heejin’s scent.

 

 

Things were not as cuddly in the kitchen. Heejin, having left the over boiling pot on the stove, dashed to remove it. Watery rice gruel akin to liquid lava splashed out, mildly burning her in the process. Startled, Heejin jumped with pain, instantaneously reeling the moment she had set the mess down on the counter. The now indelibly scorched bits lingering at the bottom of the pot wouldn’t budge, matching Jinsoul who instantly put her lips to the supposed burns. She kissed them gingerly one by one, using her kisses as makeshift bandages. “Watch out. We wouldn’t want you getting any blemishes,” she held Heejin’s arm to her face to say not like a creeper and more like the most docile domestic presence a fluff writer could conjure up.

 

 

“Aaagghh!” Heejin screamed in reply and ran to Hyunjin to report the criminal. “We need to talk about this Jinsoul situation! She just kissed me!! Like full on!!” she shrieked as if Jinsoul couldn’t hear and laugh from the other side of the thin walls and open doorway.

 

 

Throwing her toy aside, now more alter than she had been all this early morning, Hyunjin blurted out question after question. “ _WHAT? WHERE?? HOW?? DID YOU LIKE IT?!_ ”

 

 

They were both dead silent after the last of those questions. It was hard to say who was redder than the other. The equivalent of now mature pets raised together, squabbling throughout their youth until this moment, they looked on with new eyes.

 

 

With eyes blatantly fixed and intent, the disparity between them and their still sleeping robot friend charging on the couch was that much more noticeable. She spoke not of her yearnings for memories deep within, those she could still extract from her core only in her dreams. By golly, when she did pull memories from her vault, they were vivid now as they were years ago. And so, she sat there on the couch, perfectly stiff in sleep mode until eight in the morning on the dot perfectly recalling. Happy for now, until her time of wake would seal up those refuges of affection once more.

 

 

Twelve fourscore years ago in this very same spot she had first rose from her seat. She was as neoteric as a spring fawn, springing to life with fresh umber eyes. She blinked into consciousness not knowing what she was, or who she was. She saw only an empty room hosting no more than her and one other, immaculately lit to highlight their simple splendor. Mind blanker than a wide-eyed doe in the early dawn, she did know this: the woman in front of her was the most handsome creature she’d ever seen. No. She couldn’t be a creation. How could such a beauty with the lore of a siren and the allure of a swan princess be created? She was an entity that baffled this young light-haired girl, leading her to reach out until her hand was met. She was touched with the rustling wind from nowhere rippling through her thin cardigan, billowing at her skirt and down her already tied skates.

 

 

“Hi there, Vivi,” the goddess smiled on her, proud of her work. Loving every second of her nascent life. “I’m Yves.”

 

 

“Yves,” Vivi heard the silken word roll off her tongue, her moist pastel lips parting for the first time. It was fitting that this was her first word, a tribute to her creator. She was her first love.

 

 

“Come on,” Yves raised her up with both her hands in hers. “Let me teach you to skate. To fly across the floor. Then walking would seem but a breeze.”

 

 

More nervous than she’d ever been in her short seconds of a life, but liking her creator so much, she wanted to hold her. To let her lead her around this eerie rink, too fresh to have been abandoned. She questioned her not. It was only later that she would learn her life came at a cost. With a snap of Yves’s bored fingers, mightier than Thanos though nowhere remotely as justifiable, half the world had vanished. All the men of the era, the millennia, the infinity wars of time – _gone_. All for the single birth of Vivi.

 

 

But enough of Vivi’s peak summer morning dream. Reality would give birth to another tale. The digital clocks turned eight, and she awoke to a mess. Wait, there was more. A familiar voice come back to her from far away, loud and cheerful to start her day.

 

“Everyone, meet my new friend Jiwoo!” the returned traveler proclaimed. She was hastily pulled aside.

 

In a hushed tone too quiet for any far off human to hear, words decipherable by robots with sonic ears, Vivi made out Heejin’s words usually reserved for Hyunjin. This time, directed at someone else. “What are we? A charity home? We can’t keep taking in strays.”

 

 

 

***

 

 

**_12 days ago in Eden_ **

 

 

In this grand manor, alone for once, Gowon’s bête noire haunted her as it would starting from the day of her conception. To think a woman perpetually boasting of her regality like her would be like a shear mortal. Belligerently besieged by spirits of her self-made netherworld. She had asked for her memories to stay intact, her death to remain a fact. Death was in the details and those details she liked obscure. Yet there was one line that would not leave her, one ushered by she herself as the tiara in Yves’s hand touched the crown of her head in the slightest. Moments before she had taken the last bite of her pineapple, she had requested so earnestly with a simple common human’s desperation, “Please, please. I’ve lived all my life pretending to be a princess. Can you at least let me die as one?”

 

 

“If that’s what you so wish,” Yves had granted her this. “Now finish your fruit, Chaewon.”

 

 

Gowon wouldn’t commemorate who Chaewon was, knowing singularly that she didn’t want to know. She wouldn’t remember the last bite of the pineapple or that her tiara was fastened with pineapple crowns not gold and jewels of eden green. Nor would she be able to recall the hundred twenty years her entrapped soul wandered about, running from one room of a house of ice she had build to house her icebound mind to another. The monochrome sets, outlandish wears, and avant garde ambiance all concocted by her wintery brain to cover come one simple fact: she was dead and forgotten. Alone in death just as in life.

 

 

But this was Chaewon. Of her, Gowon would say nothing, only think of here and there when allotted the rare solo time. She was an esteemed princess, after all. She couldn’t dilly dally with such thoughts in front of others. What did she need them for anyways? She thought with some bitterness, perhaps regretting she had not run after Olivia.

 

 

She scowled. No, she didn’t need her. She had all the company she needed right here with this outdated high-resolution-for-its-time flat screen and accompanying disks of shows long having completed their run. Eden was good; she was in a good place. She sold herself this myth at all cost. Fittingly, she picked up the disk for season one of some strange American show called _The Good Place_ Olivia had wanted to watch together. This would be Gowon’s petty revenge. She would watch without her while she was probably gaming alone in her room under the covers. She would see what all the buzz had been all those years ago about the woman who ended up in paradise on a fluke, finding it to be nothing as she pictured. Humans make the best show, simply by living and fanaticizing their own experiences in show form, Gowon remembered that Hyejoo had seemed to think. It was in this fantasy that they were the closest to the truth.

 

 

And so, Gowon started the first episode and thought of not hers nor Olivia’s but Hyejoo’s own fresh start in this place they both called home. Her episodic anecdotes began with a day the four stood in the outback gardens on the edge of what separated them from the encroaching forest. “It’s okay,” ever-reassuring Yves patted the group’s latest addition on the back. Fresh from death, delivered over by the in-between, Hyejoo fumbled in her new bearings, withdrawing into a slumped frown. (How cute she was in this dejection and for what cause, Gowon thought then as she did now.) The dandelion Hyejoo tried to blow on simply wouldn’t budge regardless of how much aggressive blowing and many strange noises she let out. Yves smiled either the smile of a genial teacher or of a skilled jack of all trades. “It takes eons to be able to do it properly.” From her words it had seemed more the latter instead of the former.

 

 

“You old hag,” Chuu said not unkindly, laughing all the while. “You make blowing wind sound like the most amazing, skillful magic in the world.” Having said such, she demonstrated her ease at the task, taking Yves’s dandelion as her own and breathing on it effortlessly. The flower broke apart, glowing shades of fruits tastiest in this season as the hundred pieces flew with the wind like starlight, right into Yves’s face.

 

 

Hyejoo snickered at Yves’s dismay, full out laughing when she gave chase to their penguin friend, waddling away in haste. And this left the newcomer and Gowon. Alone but not alone, to pick the fresh spring blossoms. Their sideway glances from time to time, accidentally touching fingers as they went for the same flowers once and again, all indications of their friendship blooming in the deep darkness like a flower meant to fly free.

 

 

Time was the single factor capable of flying faster. It was after the first few episodes of the fantasy comedy that Gowon thought of her own dark comedy. For she and Hyejoo too had both contemplated the immoralities of this immortal life as their character counterparts did. Those years ago she had spent with Hyejoo pestering her on her bed seemed not so far off. Modesty and propriety were tools the most esteemed of royals used to conceal their moral decay. Who was Gowon to differ? In all honesty, who wanted to be the one and only in their own room freezing over when a hot-blooded companion was right next door? “Hyejoo. Hyejooo. Hyejoo-ah! So what were you in your life?” she wanted to know from the youngest of the bunch, lying on her side with her face propped up in her hands. She didn’t need to be in such a posture to stay up, saying Hyejoo’s name on repeat was enough of a rush. As simple as that.

 

 

Hyejoo shrugged from her side of the bed, minding Gowon’s presence this night too. She mindlessly responded without putting down her handheld gaming console, “I don’t know. Can’t recall. I just know that I’m good at games. Video games or sports or any other random sort of game.”

 

 

Gowon would have gone on say how cool she thought it was, to be good at any trait really. She would have had Chuu not been extra noisy in Yves’s room that night. Her laugh echoed through the adjoined bedchambers of the estate. “Sometimes, they’re so sweet. Sometimes, they’re so secretive, huh? What do you think they’re doing anyways? Always hanging out without us,” Gowon posed.

 

 

The answer came directly to them from next door. “How do you always manage to sneak out without Teacher noticing?” they overheard a hyped Chuu. They couldn’t hear a sultry Yves replying, “The same way you always manage to sneak into my bed.” They could make out however, Chuu going quiet. But not for long for Chuu and Yves were not just…for lack of better words and a fear of being rated, ‘making out.’

 

 

“Well, they’re playing their own adult games. That’s for sure,” Hyejoo commented offhandedly. Tripping up on her game, letting her race car slip into second place, she was quick to place the blame on Chuu. “What the heck is she so damn loud for?!” Fuming with pouting lips, she only began to see how loud she herself had been when all noise ceased.

 

 

Gowon, eyes sparkling, burst into laughter. “Assa! You should always yell at them through the walls like this.” She rest her head on Hyejoo’s shoulder, finding it the perfect height to do so.

 

 

Hyejoo roughed more than rouge, reddening even further when she saw Gowon’s lips so close to her own. _Which colored which?_ she pondered. The rose petals of the flowers around their home tinted red, bitten by Gowon’s rosy lips. Or was it the other way around? She needed to know. A quick, simple kiss and she was convinced it was Gowon giving life to all the flowers she had known and many more she would want to. She tasted of petals and lingered similar to the aftermath of consuming a pineapple, tingling Hyejoo’s every nerve.

 

 

That was it. One kiss, lips to lips, and Princess Gowon was released from her ice castle, feeling the summer she had so long waited for. She could only regret not kissing her back. Not taking that final step when Hyejoo was still Hyejoo. It was that decision that left her here without Hyejoo, without even Olivia to watch the last episode of the show. Outside, the novel pink moon of that night gave way to the yellow sun. The pastel colors of the rising sun illuminating her television screen brought her to a final memory for the dawn. A recent early morning in art class with the girls, painting the skies with Olivia.

 

 

Yves and Chuu sketched skies that were true with toasty hues. Gowon slathered on unenthusiastic blues, letting them drip and drop. And Olivia? She found Gowon there scouring within the heap of thorns, maybe embedded by her own crown, and offered her the aid of a knight in shining silver armor. She handed her a pastel, no longer letting Gowon’s blues get dizzy around them both. “Thought you could use a bit of color,” she said to this unkind snob that had refused to talk to her ever since she took her first step into the grand premise. _She doesn’t even know me. She’s not my Hyejoo anymore. She’s just a fake that you’ve made,_ she had heard Gowon enflaming Yves upon her arrival. “It’s lavender. Seems to me like it’s your color.” She handed her the crayon smiling timorously, shyly nevertheless. It was Gowon’s new favorite color. She took it, frozen in place though not rigid, rather melting. She secretly refused to use it and kept it on her person instead. People want to keep things that shine in their hands. Immortals were no different.

 

 

The recollection of this exchange ended as _The Good Place_ ’s pilot season also reached its conclusion. Gowon didn’t so much as gasp at the plot twist. She had predicted it all along, sensed it from the start. Perhaps known before she even began the show. So she stood up in haste, no longer able to lie to herself about where she was or who she was. Nor how she had come to dwell on such a haughty temperament. What was Eden without Hyejoo? What was Eden without Olivia? There was no difference between the two and the sadness their absence left Gowon with. She was only starting to work out these feelings she had. She hated every millisecond of it. And so, she ran. Ran as fast as her petite legs and stylish school shoes would take her until the saw the door left ajar, finding only the bloody pit of a bitten blood plum next to an open wardrobe.

 

“Olivia! Olivia Hye! Hyejoo!” she called every name then repeated herself, running barefoot with now soiled soles to find her sole salvation. Where in the three dimensions was she?

 

 

***

 

 

**_12 seconds ago in the In-Between_ **

 

Where in the world was she, should’ve been her first question upon waking up in the center of the shrubbery. Instead, she twitched her nostrils at the ugly sight on her nose until it flew off. The most lovely of creatures could be an atrocity upon closer inspection. “Yeah, that’s right! Fly like a butterfly you little shit.” She heard light-hearted laughing at this.

 

 

“What do you have against morpho butterflies?” the buoyant voice asked.

 

 

“Nothing. But they would be better green than blue,” Hyejoo huffed. Coming to more consciousness, she looked up at the familiar face. Putting one and one together, she surmised it was this happy presence with the roundest of cheeks and the cheekiest of sunshine smiles that had brought her here. She was lying on her lap, having swoon from the knowledge that had taken over her. Bringing her back to her former self. It was good to be back, to be able to call herself Hyejoo again.

 

 

“Hyejoo, do you remember me?” the young woman with more exquisite than saffron purple hair eased her into conversation, helping her sit up.

 

 

“Of course I remember you, Choerry. The real question is why’d you bring me here.”

 

 

Pleasant as ever, Choerry with her glistening purple eye of lilac meadows let her smile close them into two crescents. “I couldn’t just leave you, you’d be alone and afraid with all these memories and no one to talk to about it,” she answered, the helpful, caring friend she was.

 

 

Hyejoo sitting cross foot, rubbed her knees with both hands for something to do. She didn’t look at Choerry when she finally spoke up again. “How would you know I’d be alone?”

 

 

“I saw so in one of the mirrors,” she pointed to the never-ending field of mirrors laid out flat against the ground surrounding them in all directions. This was Choerry's own home of sorts, Hyejoo recalled. She had made it her mission to watch over them all, peering in from time after time. Dropping in on occasion, biting the cherry bullet. What's more, it wasn't simply the present that she could see. Her voice dropped as it rarely did into a tone more glum than Olivia's plum. “She leaves, runs off to join the others on earth.”

 

 

Having watched one too many mystical flicks in her days and lived an enchanted afterlife, Hyejoo asked, “What if you made it a self-fulfilling prophecy by bringing me here?”

 

 

Choerry plucked a dandelion brimming with seed and handed it to Hyejoo replying, “Why? Are you sure she’d come looking for this Olivia Hye?”

 

 

The sound of wind blowing against her ear punctured her mind. Hyejoo thought back of a gentler Gowon on the edge of her toes to match her height just so she could play with the little knot of hair Hyejoo had made for herself. _Hyejoo-ah! Hyejoo-ah!_ she used to call her so genially, so carefree. She would act as if she would take a bite out of Hyejoo's apple hair, a scrumptious snack to make her giggle and glow with unadulterated mirth. Gowon flew around Hyejoo's subconscious, pinpointing her weakness, her softness. This Gowon wouldn't even voice her complaint when Hyejoo would retaliate by playing with her malleable cheeks. She was a far cry from the princess Olivia came to know. It confused her through and through. Hyejoo couldn't be sure. She was sure that her fever was running high, throat parched. It was side effect of anyone not of the odd eye trio or unfortunate lost souls being here. “You know I don’t belong here,” Hyejoo avoided answering with her comment. “My human _co_ must be sick because of me.”

 

 

“You forget that time flows differently for us. It’s different between here, there, and Eden. You’ve been out for a while, too. Imagine how long it’s been on earth. Maybe she’s already dead and wandering around trying to find her spot in the afterlife.”

 

 

On the other side of the grassland, where the exposed grass ended and the thick forest began, Yeojin cowered over Kim Lip’s now single red eye. “Please don’t hurt me! I might already be dead for all I know. Please, I have family waiting for me!” She found a pot from nowhere and placed it on her head for protection. "You're going to hide my body among the trees, aren't you?!" she thought she fathomed Kim Lip's intent, the imposing shade of scarlet intently staring her down.

 

 

Yeojin's squinting eyes hiding from her in fear, gave way to an eye she let open a tad to see if Kim Lip would reply. From her visage to her mannerisms and quirks. It was reminiscent, too much to be coincidental. She held out a hand and placed it on the pot’s bottom, demonstrating her firmness. “Who is Jo Haseul to you?” she demanded to know. She was almost certain now that this young girl saw the forest for what it was and not as the noir city humans recently deceased often saw it as.

 

 

"S-s-she's my sister!" The youngin cleared her throat. "She'll beat you up if you lay a finger on me!" she boasted with a confidence even she knew to be false. "Now can we go, please?"

 

 

And so, Kim Lip brought her back to earth. A path in the forest had opened up for them then and there. The same path that had long ago taken Haseul home. And what a home welcoming it was. The roommates pouring in to run up and embrace long lost Yeojin, tears flowing freely. The momentous bittersweet comeback of a girl now a young woman herself from the long years away played out in seconds to Kim Lip. She was there and not there. She saw shadows where others saw solid figures. She saw pain where there was joy. Above away, she saw Haseul, acting like she didn't see her. This began her eclipse. It was her destiny. The trees of the in-between who uprooted themselves to let Kim Lip in, to take her here had fated such.

 

 

Such thoughts of fate crossed Jinsoul’s mind not. Confused by the human reunion, Jinsoul found her own. “You’re here. You really left and came to find me.” She smiled kissing a dazed Kim Lip on the lips. Kim Lip gave her a thoughtless kiss back, her hand on the small of her back, her mind elsewhere. She had laid eyes on her, the short woman scuttling away to the kitchen on excuse of watching the food she was making.

 

 

Kim Lip excused herself and followed her. A confrontation waiting decades though neither had seen coming manifested itself. Each step she took witnessed the stretch of eternity, making her fight through the draining slow motion to reach her destination by her side. Perhaps this was Haseul's fantasy and she was dutifully following along. Caring not for this theory, she stood behind Haseul the girl she had known, but now with womanly hair cut short like their relationship. “When you saw the way out on your own, I even ripped out my odd eye at your request to forget you,” she began, red hot, with her heart palpitating like this. Was it still love? After all this time? “Yeojin wouldn’t let me forget. She brought back my sight. She, a mortal girl, could heal an undead.”

 

 

Haseul sad nothing to this. Her wiping her tears away while cutting cucumbers and not onions though spoke for her.

 

 

“I need to know, Haseul.” She held her from behind. Yes, it was still love. As moving as it was unchanged. “Is she our daughter?”

 

 

***

 

**_Random Short Side Story 3:_ **

 

“Excuse, have you seen this girl?” an exasperated Hyunjin, Yves, Gowon, and Yeojin asked holding up their respective images of their lost loved one. They were in different places, different times, sharing the same purpose.

 

 

“What does she look like?” the strangers across the known world trying to help asked.

 

 

“Beautiful,” said little Hyunjin with her picture of her parents, Yves with her sketch of Chuu bouncing about, Gowon with a doodle of a wolf with human hair, and Yeojin with a frog sticker on her hand.

 

 

Meanwhile, in an unmarked grey building, yet another series of interviews was being conducted. “Who would you bring with you to a haunted house and why?” the faceless voice queried for sinister reasons still unknown.

 

 

“Gowon, to laugh at her screaming,” Hyejoo replied right off the bat.

 

 

“Kim Lip because I can hide behind her big shoulders,” said Jinsoul.

 

 

“Yeojin because she’s so loud it would scare off the ghosts,” laughed Haseul.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 ** _A/N: Dun dun!_ Did you see it coming or did I make it too obvious lol? Anyways, I ** **may edit and add on more to the end later! And just fyi the side stories aren't cannon, they're just for fun. As always, please share and comment. I would really love to hear what you all have to say about #LoonaverseTale  ^^**

**Until next week then~**

 

 ** _Next chapter spoilers_** : Viseul, Kimseul, and more. Much more Loona lore~

 

 


	4. Of Mothers and Creations

**Chapter 4**   _in which Haseul's past haunts her one restless night making her share her memories with Vivi, Vivi in turn goes into a deep slumber where her erased memories also come to light, and old friends look at each other anew_

* * *

 

 

Haseul’s head spun as she lied in bed, lying with lurid lies lapidating her conscience, holding onto her child who knew her as _‘sister’_ and not _‘mom’_. She had been heartbroken once thinking she had lost her forever. Now she hurt anew that her wandering child had come back, aged though still as clueless among her own other parent of all people. The world was quiet, but Haseul’s compunctious heart was not. It beat with opalescent beats still at the long-gone sight of Kim Lip locked lips to lips with another. She hadn’t come just to find her after all these years. An envious green Haseul tossed and turned amidst Yeojin’s sleepy protests, envisioning again and again how naturally Jinsoul had approached to kiss the newcomer as if it was a common greeting among them two. How Kim Lip left without protest at the tug of the arm by the lustrous Jinsoul, not needing to hear an answer from Haseul after all. (Their new temporary tennant Jiwoo had gone as far as bidding them the warmest farewell on their way out, laughing all the while hoping to see the couple again soon. That pitiful clueless fool.) Kim Lip knew. She had to have already known, and could face her not. She blamed her, she knew she did.

 

Hating to tussle wretchedly with these midnight thoughts, Haseul got up to open the window, letting her worries slip into the cold wind like folded paper moons. Her child was back, yet Haseul’s heart waned instead of waxed. She had assumed it was better for the concerned parties not to know. For how could they be concerned if they didn’t know there was something to be concerned over to start with? But her logic was full of gray where there could have been white. The wind too protested her, blowing her fragile unease back at her. She was quick to shut the window and find condolement for her condition elsewhere in her home. Somewhere warm where no one and nothing would reject her nor blame her of any wrong. And she found it here by Vivi’s soon-to-hibernate self, sitting side by side with her.

 

“Mind if I join you on the couch tonight?” she asked of her after seating herself, knowing she couldn’t refuse her.

 

Gentle Vivi nodded though not without asking, “Shouldn’t you be with Yeojin? You’ve only been mentioning her for every single day all these years.”

 

Haseul’s forged smile withered, she leaned far into Vivi’s shoulder. It felt exactly like a human’s and not at all cyborg, though still stern and well-etched like another’s she once so loved. She sighed, excusing her actions saying, “She’s not still like you. The kid tosses and turns too much in her sleep. And she rolls all over me. It just got too hot.”

 

Vivi said nothing at this. Instead, she hit the target on the mark being the most precise mechanical archer. “Were you okay with our friend Jinsoul leaving with that new girl? What’s her name again?” she asked, already knowing the answer, never forgetting a name. “Kim-”

 

“Lippie,” Haseul let slip faintly with her subtle yawn. She caught herself, formerly drifting eyes revived with coruscating dreams of she and her drawn back to the limelight of the moonlight. The salmon colored effulgence emitting from the pink moon that night matched her now tinted cheeks. Silly that she still blushed over her without her here. With her hating her to who knows which amount. She was bitter over this, a self-seasoned bitterness no chef could remedy.

 

Noticing Haseul mild distress, Vivi laid her down next to her, tucking her into her side. “Would it make you feel better to tell me about her? About why you’re really upset?”

 

It would. Haseul could have monologued in the most sesquipedalian phraseology, passing on from the pink to the blue moon explaining her and Kim Lip. What use would it have been though? She refuted Vivi’s suggestion with more doubt. Even if she could narrate her lost youth to Vivi, the android could never truly understand, she decided. They were dreams she, a weathered human, could not speak of. So what would a polished android who doesn’t so much as dream of electric sheep make of them?

 

“Try me,” Vivi edged her on with her head resting on hers. She inhaled Haseul’s faint brumal aroma, holding her close the way she had seen so many human couples do. And for a second, Haseul too played into this illusion, nuzzling further in to Vivi, wishing it was this kind soul she had fallen for and not another. “You’re a great person you know. You shouldn’t think otherwise,” Vivi further spurt Haseul’s wanting to be receptive heart. “You’re a great leader, mom, and sister.”

 

Haseul gave a fake snort to the excessive compliments. “What am I? Some girl group leader?” she mused, glad her chaotic life was free of idols’ worries and filled with comparatively idle ones instead. Maybe she was kidding herself here a tad. You couldn’t exactly call what she had had a run-of-the-mill slow paced human romance. “Vivi, what do you know of eclipses?” she started, then went on to speak through thoughts Vivi could tap into instead of physical words. She started envisioning her distant past, her not picturesque tale. One that went something along the lines of this:

 

Many many years ago, so long ago that the wisest owl proclaiming the most outrageous longevity could not recall, there was a great eclipse dragging humanity into darkness. And in those over five minutes or so, Haseul lived out five hundred years not living. She was astray, wandering aimlessly among the trees. The robust canopies and the fidgeting life they hosted marking her more of a disoriented loner. In this weakest of moments, so sure she was given over wholly to an ill-fated misadventure death, she cried. Cried the way no one from her now deceased family to her closest companions had ever seen her cry. Tears the most thorough salty chartreuse that the Dead Sea itself was alive in comparison.

 

Deep in her despairing heart, in that dark place, someone entered awakening Haseul from her deserted destitute world. A world that would have fallen asleep some day, taking Haseul into a permanent eternal slumber with it. Her eye shimmered a red Haseul had never seen nor the proprietor herself had ever witnessed. It wasn’t the spectral scarlet of a slaughtering slayer, rather the vigorous red of a new dawn. The type you’d see near the equator on the most bewitching of days or across the post-eclipse sky to light up the dawn with candlelight so uncanny it was carnivorous for human care. It was the red that called them to each other. One on a mission to know why she had be rebirthed for the first time in her timeless existence, the other being drawn to the only existence in these parts that not only crossed her path but lent a hand to her.

 

“Do you need help getting out?” she posed. “You can follow me.” Shakingly, Haseul in her raggedy clothes stained with muck accepted, having herself lifted out. As she stood up, her dreadfully baggy layered peasant garb, the kind one would see in period pieces, morphed into eighties era wear. A crop dangling over clean high waisted jeans topped off with oversized jacket, eccentric shoes, and a small fir backpack. She was now caught up with the human world but lost in a new one.  

 

The trees seemed to shift and shuffle, making room for two. This young woman still holding onto Haseul, her loosely tied up overflowing blonde hair whirling against her white button up with striking red bow and a matching skirt pleated at the end, had Haseul pleading to know her more. Haseul was indeed a damsel in distress, and she was her paladin in pale blonde. “Who are you?” she marveled over her heroine’s optical opulence instead of her own thaumaturgic transformation.

 

The uniformed woman wished she knew the answer to that. Her identity was newer to her than it was to Haseul. One moment she was minding her own business, trotting around this neck of the woods, and the next she had transformed at the sight of this lost girl. Now she was just as lost as she was, only knowing that her first mission ever in this realm had something to do with this person whose hand she was holding still even now. Coming to this awareness, she released her and cleared her throat. “I’m Kim,” she said as plainly as that, remembering this was a common human surname and nothing more.

 

“That’s it? You don’t have a given name? I’m Jo Haseul, and you… You’re just Kim?” Haseul ducked from a low hanging branch to now practically chase after this Kim figure who led her on from ever increasing distances.

 

She stopped at the questioning, vooshing back with inhuman speed. It amazed Haseul more than it frightened her. She couldn’t admit such and turned away, averting herself from the red woman’s scrutiny, her immense eyes and glaring height making Haseul so punny. “And what would you call me?” the woman wanted to know, pursuing her every step.

 

Haseul tried to add distance between them, but was pulled back by her loose sleeve. Both her jacket and backpack cinematically flew off in a fell swoop causing her to whirl around, landing ceremoniously millimeters away from... “Lips,” she accidentally let out, saying the single word on her mind. The only thing in her sight. The round, red, ravishing lips, the perfect height up to help the release her worries and confusions preoccupying her mind.

 

“Kim Lip?” the woman rumiated, shapely fingers tapping at her thinking face. “Is that a common human name nowadays?”

 

“Oh,” Haseul nodded meekly lying, toying with her new bizzare clothes. Taking note again and again how scantily clad Kim Lip was by the conventions of her time. But was it her time any longer? She couldn’t be sure how long she had been out. How long she’d been gone from the known world.

 

“I’m Kim Lip then. And I’m here to help you out,” she annunciated clearly, boldened by her announcement of her new ipseity and purpose. She figured this girl was the epitome of a just cause. Jinsoul had been lured to Earth to aid a goddess, Yerim (or should she call her Choerry now?) brought to the edge of Eden to save a fallen angel of sorts, and Kim Lip? Maybe Jo Haseul was it for her. The way out of her obligation. Only, they didn’t find a way out.

 

Day in and night out, they traversed needing not to stop in their travels. It was a world without the need to eat or drink, rest or recoup. But Haseul insisted on it anyways. “Why can’t we take a rest and like make cute matching clothes or something? Hey, are you hungry? Wait, let’s stop and carve our names here!” she’d say something of the sort, rambling on endlessly.

 

“Why? You’re distracting us from our course, Jo Haseul.”

 

 _Because I’ve seen couples do it before,_ Haseul wanted to answer. “Because we can use it to mark the paths we’ve already walked, _Kim Lip_ ,” she said poignantly, making a point to highlight the strangeness of calling another by their full name. When Kim Lip walked on without understanding her intent, she called after her, “You can just call me Haseul, you know. Or-” she shied, “Haseul unnie would be nice too. And I can call you Lippie!”

 

Kim Lip stopped and turned her head back to say, “Haseul, just hurry up and do what you need to do.” When she was sure Haseul was too engrossed carving their names to notice, she grinned to herself. _Lippie._ She had this scrunched up spacious silent smile, one that had her brows pushed against her nose and her mouth spread frozen in mirth. Haseul, done with her task, pretended not to see but smiled back. It was her turn to extend a hand and lead them both into unchartered paths.

 

Like this, days and nights cycled back around albeit with minor changes, not unlike a Möbius strip constantly reinventing itself. On another occasion, fatigued by the fruitlessness of their eternal venture, Haseul called it a night. As they set up camp, pulling objects from thin air at their will as was possible here, she offered her take on their situation. “Maybe there’s a reason we both haven’t been able to find the way out. You said you’ve always been able to lead people out before right? Maybe you’re supposed to help me complete whatever unsettled issue I had before my...before my death,” she vocalized, materializing something she had been clever enough to know when most mortals would have ardently denied.

 

Taken aback, Kim Lip added kindle to the fire she had made to keep them both warm. She tossed the last twig in and sat on the log next to Haseul. This brave brilliant soul might be right. But maybe it wasn’t some task they needed to accomplish to enable her move onward, rather Kim Lip’s will holding her back. She could never say such, and insisted on, paradoxically, distracting her instead. She snapped her fingers and they were dressed in color coordinating sweaters with cherries printed on both. It was the type of graphic sweater big enough for two and comfortable enough to be a sleeping bag in of itself. “There, happy? We’re wearing matching clothes like you’ve always wanted,” Kim Lip granted her now long off wish.

 

Cheeky with satisfaction for seconds, Haseul kept on topic growing firmer. “Lippie, I’m serious. What if you’re supposed to help me overcome some issue before I can see the light or whatever?” She wouldn’t let her eyes off Kim Lip, almost demanding an answer.

 

Kim Lip scoffed. “What? Did you die as a Joseon maiden ghost or something?”

 

Neither of them expected Haseul’s little gasp. Little for Haseul, but with her operatic voice resonated through the greens in all directions. She looked away, withdrawn in her deepest of embarrassment. Kim Lip, on her part, shot up stomping, letting out a gargled scream to diffuse the tension her owl-eyed keenness had caused. They both laughed at this after some time, and drifted asleep arms length apart. A rough sleep leaving much unsaid and much to be desired.

 

Early that morning while the moon still shined it’s last, when Kim Lip arose, the source of her desire was too apparent. Haseul had taken upon herself to put on Kim Lip’s red and white uniform adding on the roundest of glasses to complete her enthralling look. She danced around like this in some sensual moon ritual all her own creation. A hand of hers reached out in search of a non-existent partner, not noticing Kim Lip’s presence. She would change this, running to her with full force, knocking her against the tree. She softened her land by cushioning the back of her head as her lips crashed against hers. Those plump red lips against Haseul’s own slender ones. And like this, the glasses were tossed wayward, the clothes flung by the wayside as if through choreographed dance.

 

It can’t be coincidence. It can’t be rushed, the sweet whispering in Haseul’s ear past the last of the night sky burgeoning. If she had known it would be the first and one of the last times she would kiss someone for years to come, she would have kissed her longer regardless of her lack of breath, held her tighter even as the strength left her, scratched her back harder as the nights and days merged. But she didn’t know what she didn’t know. She only knew that their journey at last had been fruitful. Her heart beat as two. She placed a hand on her stomach and looked at the path only she could see now. It was the way out and she knew it was over for this dream world solely for two they had concocted of first mystical greens then fiery reds.

 

The next longest total solar eclipse wouldn’t be until another twelve thousand years since recorded human history. It would last seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds on Earth some many years from then, though it would have already been another infinity in this in-between. Could either of them wait that long for a not chance but destined lunar event to dictate their next meeting? Haseul would die waiting for it, but would Kim Lip still be on the other side beyond waiting? She didn’t want her to have to endure it. The thought of a moment’s separation alone already had Haseul weeping. So she did what she thought would be a release for them both, knowing foresight only she could know.

 

“Kim Lip, I think it’s time for me to go home, and time for you to forget.”

 

She gave Kim Lip a gift of a dreamless sleep, releasing her to be Jungeun again. With this letting go, Haseul in the present also gave out. She had soundlessly sobbed herself to sleep under Vivi’s protection. Vivi too fell into a sad, sad sleep, under the protection of another. Though this time around, it was she who had been made to forget as her remembering counterpart languished.

 

Vivi’s animatronic dreams were clogs in a memory puzzle, sometimes fuzzy other times transparent when the right gears were combined in her ancient though not antediluvian mind. On this night, the pink moon enabled her to see the moonlit face of her former lover as clearly as Haseul saw hers in her thoughts. Vivi danced around the reading figure graciously, making circles forwards and backwards in her skates. “You know this is a bowling alley right? People used to roll heavy balls at pins here, not skate. It’s too slippery and cluttered here. It’s a health hazard.”

 

Hearing Vivi’s commentary, still-reading Yves grinned with half her face. She had lived long enough for her own creation to be talking back to her, lecturing her like she was the newly made being here. “I know what bowling is, Vivi,” she reassured. “But you have to trust that I don’t make mistakes. Half the world is empty now, so what’s wrong with repurposing the abandoned bits to my will?”

 

Supposing she was right, the way a younger child would not question their parents’ morality, Vivi had yet another question in mind instead. Capitalizing on her scintillating wit that her creator had endowed her with, she was more curious than most and always wanted more. More knowledge, more affection. “I hear people calling their creators ‘ _mom’_ . But I guess it would be weird, huh? What about calling you _momm_ -” she deliberately cut herself off, her perspicacity causing a very stunned though actively pleased Yves to reward her with ultimately putting down her book and smiling so wickedly. Her assiduous pupil had quite the mind and the mouth. Yves had crisscrossed the world of men for ages and found no one quite astutely ageless like Vivi. Vain as it be for one to love what was entirely theirs more than the rest of the universe, Yves thought it fitting. What was the life of millions of human scoundrels in exchange for this perfect creature? The Venus of humans, the pinnacle of unholy genesis.

 

“What were you reading that was so captivating?” Vivi got to her main question, having finally captured Yves’s attention. _Or are you really thinking about some other creation of yours? Someone else more worthy of your thoughts?_ she truly intended to ask.

 

“Nothing as captivating as you,” she replied shamelessly, effortlessly. She who had been acting as if Vivi’s words crossed her mind not, had listened intently all along. “Come take a walk with me,” Yves lured them both away from the dark building and out into the sunlight. She loved leading Vivi on, taking her to the stairs on the side of the elevated building. The sky was a transfixing aquamarine blending in with the seas in the distance until one was indistinguishable from the other. “I was reading about butterflies,” was her sudden answer. She went on with scholarly prowess, “Have you ever walked by a glass display of long dead butterflies and seen them change color? Their hues ebbing and flowing as you stroll pass? Even the blue morpho butterfly has no blue pigments. It’s rather the shapes of the tiny scales making up their wings reflecting in such a specific way that makes them blue. Only iridescent blue light escapes and makes it to our eyes. Warm and loved as blue may be, it’s a rarity in nature. The blue we so renown is just a sham.”

 

Vivi thought about this, not grasping Yves’s intent. Knowing she was still missing some bit of information or another, she asked for more clarification. “Has someone made you blue?”

 

Yves shook her head, carelessly dropping an apple she had bitten into down the ledge, not knowing it would hit a stray fruit bat far from home. “The other way around. I think I’ve made too many blue, including you.” She patted her head, not belittling, more caring. She raised Vivi’s face by the chin, the way Jinsoul would countless years later. Instead of stroking her under the chin like a pet owner or loving mother would, she kissed her passingly on the cheeks. She then came clean to her. “I had helped someone forget their worries.”

 

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

 

 _If only,_ Yves thought. _If only._ “I also allowed her to live on a lie for the rest of eternity.”

 

“I-I don’t quite follow,” Vivi hated to admit her shortcoming. Her inability to read Yves the way Yves read all manners of things - books, women, _her_.

 

Yves elaborated, remaining somewhat cryptical. “She was trapped in this great mansion of her own building. She ran and ran futilely from one set room to another seeing things were there weren’t until my new companion and I helped her find her way out. She was an upcoming actress with dreams of grandeur. But I let her be a princess.”

 

Still not fully comprehending Yves’s story, Vivi did not fail to empathize with her remorse. “Consider it a gift of new life,” Vivi assuaged her with the softest of embraces. Yves was so tall compared to Vivi, mighty in her experiences and powers, yet frail where one least expected. She too could be so mortal. Flawed and weak.

 

“Yeah,” Yves breathed out. She let her recollection of guilt go to be purged by Vivi. The goddess Yves lived not on memories of transgressions but on pleasure, and very soon, merely hugging Vivi was not enough. “Hey Vivi, there’s a grand hotel like none ever seen before in new Hong Kong. Want to stay there for the night?” she proposed unabashed. Her dauntless womanizing had Vivi dizzy.

 

She wasn’t the only one. Like a fairytale you’d want to eavesdrop on, Chuu looked on at their girls’ night out through Eden’s mirror. Her emotions filling up, she ran to Hyejoo for help. She was a raging penguin, waddling faster than her body could keep up with. When she found Gowon on the youngest’s lap, in her own bona fide royalty manner, Chuu was quick to toss her aside. “Move, Gowon! I have a mission for Hyejoo!”

 

“Ugh,” Gowon grumbled. She, the flimsy thing she was, would have been thrown off if Hyejoo didn’t hold her down. “Why not a mission for me? I’ve been here longer you know. I have the higher standing,” she reminded them both, dusting off the non-existent dirt that the insult had sullied her with.

 

“Well this is a job for a muscle woman!” Chuu brushed her off again. She didn’t care if she offended her. She was a woman entranced, enthralled by a blooming burgundy she wanted as her own. Yves lived off of pleasure, that was true. For Chuu, she had this constant desire, this delirious drive. She would lose to none to win the unwinnable. To enrapture the insatiable.  

 

An irritated Gowon held her arms pressed against each other, fists tight in mock fight mode. “I can be tough!” Her display of might was easily pulled apart and dismantled by Hyejoo who smirked all the while.

 

“So what’s the job?” Hyejoo inquired over Gowon’s mild protesting in the back. She was quiet enough to be talked over, and weak enough to be overpowered by Hyejoo. Actually, truth be told, Gowon was someone of a skinny legend from what she could recall. She could out arm wrestle any, any that she put her mind to that is. She loved to win, to _‘assa’_ in her foes’ faces. But losing to Hyejoo inexplicably felt equally exhilarating. If not more.

 

“I need you to scare off a snake for me,” Chuu said with a glint that Gowon found familiar though could not name. She saw flashes of Chuu and Yves running towards her, then no more. Her memories blacked out while Chuu did not notice and tossed the mission bearer a shining green apple.

 

“Wait!” Gowon regained herself, calling out loud as she could before Hyejoo could take a bite. “Don’t you dare forget m-” she cleared her throat, “yourself. Okay, Hyejoo?”

 

And days later when Olivia was returned to the gates of Eden in her stead, Yves had begun the introduction like this: “This is our new friend Olivia.”

 

“Hye-” Yves’s latest creation began to say, remembering the last request of the one she once cared for most. But Yves’s fruit had been too potent. She only got that far before her memory collapsed on her. “Olivia Hye,” she finished to the let down of Gowon’s hinged breath. She would forgive neither of them for taking Hyejoo away.

 

***

 

Their hands touched while they were walking. Handing Choerry her lemonade, Hyejoo kicked dirt up into the air wishing she had not been so cloudy-minded that she had forgotten herself. Been muddled to the extent that Gowon could recognize her not. She carried on a butterfly having lost it’s kaleidoscope, seeing now only in solo color versus the swarm’s rainbow. She had the look of a bubble pop star, bouncy and youthful, but the mind of a true artist, struggling over the meaning of their own existence.

 

As she stumbled in the forest all day, Choerry by herself too felt butterflies of another sort, her heart growing so much where Hyejoo’s courage and self-worth shrank. Her heart had grown like bubble gum with the tips of her ears tingling. She couldn’t name from A to Z what love really was but she wanted to know. She had fallen into her own version of love. Her own Cheorry motion, or was it a cherry motion? Ripe for the picking. She wanted to keep Hyejoo here forever, into a purple midsummer night’s dream. But her dream was not shared by Hyejoo.

 

“Choerry, what is love?” Hyejoo genuinely wondered. Could she call her silly pinning such? If she could, it didn’t justify how she had treated _her_. She had chose forgetfulness the equivalent of death in retribution over the chance to call her name once more. She was an egoist perhaps, having thought too much of herself, her so-called righteous cause that she was now no longer sure she could stand by.

 

The two made for bodacious company for each other. Choerry looked at Hyejoo as the sun left her. She was locked in her secret, in the deepening darkness. The secret door that no one could open had been opened by Hyejoo, the pandora’s box of memories had started to open, the light spreading with Hyejoo. She laughed, a false full chirpy laugh of sunshine where there was already too much. “How would I know?” Sensing Hyejoo’s grumpy dissatisfaction at this answer, her need for a Choerry taught dating class, she piped, “I guess it’s like kimbap or dumplings,” she tried to explain in a way trencherman Hyejoo would understand best. “So sweet to the taste but more difficult to perfect than college exams.”

 

It was Hyejoo who now scoffed. “They aren’t sweet you know. I think ‘scrumptious’ would be a better word.”

 

Choerry laughed for real now at how Hyejoo had grown. She was so different from the young person she'd seen on the edges of Eden long, long ago. “I think you’ve been hanging out too much with all those unnies,” she accused.

 

Hyejoo didn’t refute this. She caught sight of the same butterfly that had landed on her nose earlier and followed it. What may have been a mirage for some, was worthy of pursuit by Hyejoo. She couldn’t give up on this, this shred of hopes of dreams. She didn’t know where she was going, but she was going somewhere closer to _her_. It was better to be somewhere around her than nowhere at all. “Maybe we’re both too idyllic about how dreams may come true. It shouldn’t be sweet or easy. Love is supposed to be cruel,” she sounded twice her age before she turned to mock Choerry saying, “But I guess you wouldn’t know that being forever alone, huh?”

 

Chasing after Hyejoo but never able to catch up, Choerry came to the same conclusion. Love was indeed too cruel. If only Hyejoo knew.

 

***

 

They were as sick and lovesick as their counterparts. If not more visibly so. Heejin kicked her sheets endlessly, first too hot then too chilly. Hyunjin on the bunk above her listened in on the sound of her bunkmate’s creaking mattress and sighed in sync with her. After all the day's commotion - the burnt down kitchen, the many new faces, the return of an old one - there was one thing that none of them had said aloud. Actually, there were many things of this nature, but this one pressed Hyunjin most. She needed Heejin around her to resolve it.

 

“Hey Heejin, restless Puppy, do you want to come up here?” she called her by her old childhood nickname for her, one she had stopped using because the other kids had made fun of them for it. She didn’t care about the teasing now that it was only them two. On the contrary, she had never minded. Only stopping because Heejin did.

 

Heejin gave a not convincing argument the same now as the past. “Who would want to be close to you? Stop calling me that,” she flushed and ascended the steps to Hyunjin’s bunk regardless.

 

“That better?” Hyunjin asked, sharing her blanket with Heejin.

 

Heejin mumbled something indecipherable along the lines of “You must be really sick to ask me to come up here,” and made herself comfy. The night did not end there though. Pulling something from her black hat, she recalled the past like deja vu. “Hey Hyunjin,” she reached out for her until she stopped swatting her hand away and would take it. “Happy Mothers’ Day.”

 

“Hee-” she was silenced with a gentle, lingering kiss. A first kiss, as chaste as they were the decade back chasing each other never realizing they were pursuing the other until... Then the kiss wasn’t so gentle. She dreamed it would last forever, to make her forget forever. That was until they heard deliberate coughing either from Jiwoo, Yeojin, or both from the bunks across from theirs. A wide awake cough not carefully disguised as a sleeper’s grumbling.

 

“Maybe we should get our own place,” Heejin pulled away first to clear her throat. “You know, so we can each have our own bed _faaarr_ away from each other in separate rooms and what not.”

 

“Oh, I’d like that,” Hyunjin haphazardly agreed, thinking on her feet.

 

Heejin wanted to punch her shoulder. “You would?”

 

“Yeah?” Hyunjin retracted quick. “I mean, no?” She flustered. “What do you want me to say?”

 

“Ugh, I can’t believe you,” the full grown Heejin derided her the same way her younger self once did.

 

Caring for a fallen bat, a much younger Hyunjin too had retorted, “What?” On that day on the farm, she had come back with cherries for her injured friend. “She needs help!” she asserted in her high voice of a child, eager to help and heal.

 

“Ew, ew, ew!” Heejin backed away in fright when the winged creature staggered on its injured wing. She clutched onto the towering Hyunjin for protection. Though they were the same age, Hyunjin was already so much bigger than her, more dependable and insightful. At least when it came to animals.

 

“Relax, it just wants it’s final meal. It says it’s a fruit bat. It won’t hurt you,” she calmed her new scaredy cat of a friend who was already on the verge of tears. She felt her shaking and patted her head half a head down from hers. Normally, she wouldn’t let on that she could understand animals to the strangers passing by the farm on business or recreation. From this silly girl with her two front teeth nervously sunk into her arm, she sensed no malice. “It’s okay, you easily spooked bunny.”

 

“I’m not a bunny!” she, the cutest, palest of girls pretended to throw a fit, kicking hay here and there. Heejin was at a sensitive stage, having recently lost much of her teeth and fearing kids could taunt her for it. “Can’t you call me something cuter?” She tugged at Hyunjin’s sleeve mostly complacent with this playmate of hers, though still a bit skeptical.  

 

Before she could speak, someone much older beat her to it. “Puppy, come here with Hyunjin!”

 

They ran with all their might cross the fertile green fields stretching into a forest far far back beyond where human eyes could see but the dying bat’s could. “Mommy!” Heejin called out with a winner’s ring, she had managed to out run her not so little friend. Or so she thought.

 

“Mom!” Hyunjin halted in her steps and called for her own mother in a much different tone. The frustrations of a rueful child still needing guidance overtook her brave yet pretentious maturity. “Mom, you said you wouldn’t smoke anymore!” she approached her mom apprehensively, stomping on the ground, demanding she drop her cigarette.

 

Heejin’s mom pulled her away as her stubborn tears pooled in the corners of her eyes refusing to drop. “Hyunjin honey, let it go. Your mom… She needs a break right now.”

 

She didn’t get it. She really didn’t. Why was her mom, one of the happiest of people, in such shambles now? Hyunjin had put on a brave face through it all and she was just a child. Why did her mom have to break down like this, not saying anything to her only to drop her off here at some strangers’ land?

 

“Hyunjin honey,” her mom tried to coo her. “I... I have to get things ready for the funeral. While I’m out I think it’s best if you stay here with Heejin’s family for a while. Is that okay?” she asked rhetorically, keys already swinging in her hands.

 

“No! No!! I don’t want to! You can’t just leave me!” She fought and fought and cried and cried until late in the night when only Heejin was left to keep her company. It was the worst Mothers’ Day of her life and also the last Mothers’ Day of her remaining mother’s life. She didn’t know it then. If she had, she wouldn’t have let her go. In her place now, she could only hold Heejin closer, letting the last adamant tear hiding in her all these years finally see the splendor of the moon lit high above.

 

It was best to speak of affection while one still could. If she could go back, she wouldn’t have been resentful until the end. So when Heejin rubbed her back and leaned against her, brushing her hair out of her face, Hyunjin admitted words she had always swallowed back. “Thank you for everything.”

 

“You don’t have to say it.”

 

But she did. And it was beyond anything Heejin could’ve imagined. “I love you.”

 

 

 

* * *

**Sorry, no short random side story but happy early Mother’s Day! Idk if y’all realized what I did there with the ‘Mothers’ Day’ instead lol… Anyways, as always, I’ll edit later, and please support and comment to let me know what you think! ^^**

 

**_Next chapter spoilers (in no particular order):_ **

“I’m being more egoistic than I have ever been.”

 

“You know, I used to run in circles all the time. No matter how fast I ran, I kept finding myself, or rather another me, in the same place. It was a warped cycle. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break free.”

 

“And then what happened?”

 

“Someone told me to go see the world with a new set of eyes... That’s why I’m here now.”

 

She tapped the tip of her nose, watching her other finger press into her malleable cheeks. She was her little play thing, she liked to think knowing full well that it was the other way around. She was hers.

 

“Are you Vivi?”

 

“How did you-”

 

“A little flightless birdy told me you’ve been wreaking havoc and I’m here to wreck you,” she wanted to say all heroically in the same grandness as her video game protagonists. To her shock, she was cut down before she could open her mouth.


	5. Bad At Dating, Good At Being Soulmates

**Chapter 5**   _in which the girls try to live out their life normally besides LoonatheDorm now clowning 2jin, Vivi tries to distract Haseul from her sorrows by setting her up with someone new, Kim Lip and Jiwoo enroll in a certain dating class with Jinsoul and Heejin, and yet another someone is newly spotted in Hong Kong_

* * *

 

“I love you.” Hyunjin’s three soft-spoken words verbalized on the most unordinary of nights unleashed waves and waves of canorous symphony. Hidden vocals seemed to echo their obscure song, an ode to the bravery of affirmation. A toast to the shy parties still linked hand in hand, thought to have been perfectly giddy together had it not been for the silence of both right after those said words. Hyunjin didn’t expect an answer she already knew and needed not said, but she certainly didn’t expect what was to transpire. Her sickness had her ears clogged, her voice elevated and her head not quite where it should have been.

 

“Oh my gosh!” a Jiwoo who overheard loud and clear gushed on the couple’s behalf, hiding her own blushing face, acting as if she was the recipient of the long-waited confession. Being her theatrical self, she had tossed her sheets up and squealed too raucously to feign sleep any longer. Her alert self caused great embarrassment one bed over.

 

On the bunk below her, Yeojin didn’t help the situation either. “Man, I wish I really was dead,” she said to be heard.

 

Hyunjin was spurned, her flaming face not unmatched by Heejin’s who backed away, retreating to her own fortress below to hide in shame. “See? I told you you didn’t have to say it!” she let her words take on a different meaning, blaming Hyunjin entirely for the embarrassment. It had now really become too hot to sleep.

 

***

 

“Are you really going to take that dating class?” Hyunjin canvassed Heejin indiscreetly over a hasty breakfast, in reality meaning to ask if she was going to keep acting as though that night now a week ago was a dream. To not speak it into existence. Her usual content-cat smile seemed chimerical, a memory of a love-laced trance.

 

Heejin rebuffed her, stuffing her mouth with more bread than she could handle so she couldn’t challenge her further. “I told you: it’s a pass or fail class. It’s just a fun elective I need as a filler class. What do you have against it?”

 

“I-” Hyunjin gargled as she munched away, for once loathing how dense this loaf of bread was. Not so different from Heejin apparently. Oh how things you love could build up your expectations so just to break them down.

 

In an argumentative world of two alone, they did not take into account the other four sitting next to them. “What’s wrong with them?” Haseul whispered to Jiwoo.

 

Jiwoo was ready to spill. Barely initiated into this new household with no recollection of her past mind what Haseul had told her and she was already one of the kids. Older according to the age they’d put on her new identification documents. But still, very much a snickering child. A freshman-like gossip girl teeming with eagerness to share her tasteful tea.

 

Before she could answer however, Yeojjin butted in with a loud, “We wouldn’t know. They’re not the type to... _kiss and tell_.” She laughed maniacally, a self-proclaimed mad genius nudging at Jiwoo who had to suppress her laughter next to a Haseul, now picking up on too much. And then there were paramours who were paramours no longer. Their pinings thrust into the spotlight - a well-lit dining room in which the food on the table now burned with flaming bashfulness. It certainly wasn’t the heated romance one of them had darlingly pictured.

 

“Haseul, control her daughter! She’s being annoying and sticking her nose into others’ business again!” Heejin took her abashed anger out on their shared caretaker of sorts.

 

Had it been the Haseul of old around her twelve-year-old, she would have argued that Yeojin was just her sister, therefore, not her sole responsibility. But this was the Haseul of twelve months on from the disappearance, the Haseul that had lived the outstretched equivalent of what felt like an agonizing twelve years in that time span just to have Yeojin returned to her. Aged beyond her years yet not wisened a day past it. So she did as mothers would do and scolded them all regardless of station or position in the household. “Hurry and get to school all of you!” Thankfully reasonable still, her sternness didn’t extend to those who didn’t deserve it. Her poised lips turned into a crescent. She turned to her other companions clarifying, “Not you Jiwoo, you can eat slowly. It’s only your first day. Oh, and Vivi, what do you want to do while they’re out?”

 

The couple that wasn’t a couple took Haseul’s words into effect, dashing out to their university. Yeojin, dressed in the uniform of the local high school, wasn’t as quick to take off. “Hey, wait! I know I’m not your kid or anything but aren’t you gonna say anything to me? Your prodigal daughter come back from the dead?”

 

Fists clenched, Haseul felt wholley betrayed by the unexpected flagrancy of the question. She circled miles in her mind to calm her frigid face, reminding herself that Yeojin truly knew nothing. That she hadn’t the clue how Haseul would squish her tight night after night to feel the company of someone besides her own loneliness. Nor of the kisses her peppered on her wide forehead in her sleep, one no so different from her other mother’s. Nor how she cried less when her first words were ‘sister’ instead of ‘mom’ and more when she had grown up years without her at the blink of an eye. How evil the in-between was to hold someone captive and spit them out in a different form. Haseul had spent days sorting out Yeojin’s not anticipated comeback, phoning here and there, going everywhere for the impossible paperwork needed to bring one back from the dead, to prove their legitimate being once more. Printed in along with the loads and loads of bureaucratic jumble were heaps and heaps of questions. Questions she had for Yeojin but didn’t dare start to ask fearing she would unravel, questions Yeojin wanted to answer for her. But if they questioned her disappearance and reappearance, if they were to question anything, they must question everything in their lunar world of lores without answers. The men who all had gradually came to accept were vanquished for some unknown greater good, the miraculous apparition of the remainers’ newfound inhuman powers, the sudden memory lost of those that could interlace their paths. There were more curiosities than explanations. Humans could only do as they did best, go on living and accepting they were pawns and not queens.

 

Haseul heaved a heavy sigh. Had she used her singular wish for her child - the most powerful magic a mom can bestow upon her offspring - wisely? She began to question. She had wished upon Yeojin’s birth that she never be alone without the love of a mother. She had spent her most vulnerable of moments securing the fate of her child thus. Even when she was not by her side she had inklings she was not by her lonesome. She was sure of this when she’d come home from her part time job during high school to a rambunctious young Yeojin climbing all over Vivi, tugging at her hair demanding to know how such a startlingly pink mass could be natural and of this world. She was surer still when she was returned to her last week, ruddier than ever.

 

The only one redder than her was Kim Lip, the long lost mother having met her long lost daughter after all. When Jinsoul went to kiss her, for the split second, briefer than the flapping of a pigeon’s wings, she had been glad that she too had someone to keep her warm all these years. It hadn’t been Haseul’s consummate sanctity that led to her and Kim Lip’s intimate consummation. It was a corrupt innate need, spiraling them on in such a manner until they were entwined. Now that she had Yeojin, perhaps it was only fair that Kim Lip had a love from her own world as well, she adjudicated unjustly for them both. There it was. The truth. In every thought of Yeojin laid a thought of Kim Lip. She had pushed her away only to pull this offshoot of her, their beloved child, closer.

 

Pushing these thoughts from the forefront where they could be hacked at, Haseul nearly stuttered in slow simmering repression before the advice of someone came back to her. _Speak rapidly, confidently, like you know exactly what’s going on and you won’t stutter as much_ , she had been coached. She had taught her daughter the same. “Just eat your damn breakfast you twerp,” Haseul laid down the rules of her land, her household in which the other occupants were obedient renters or grateful temporary guests. “Oh, and Yeojin,” she caught her attention again.

 

“What?” the child defiantly spat back.

 

“The next time you chase after an imaginary animal friend and get caught in some metaphysical realm where no one can find you, I will hunt you down myself. And end you myself.”

 

When they had all left mind her and Vivi, Haseul sat down next to her to watch the news. Another tragedy in some part of the world, another fire, another war. She kept up with the news here and there  (having tracked it diligently for any sign of her vanished child), witnessing how humanity wrecked the world and the world wrecked humanity in retribution. What was these young ones’ deep need to preserve, prolonged, and procreate? She was like them once. Now, in her flowing off-white dress and patterned cardigan, she was just another old lady bird having been there, done all that. A much younger her had long ago heard a heartbeat and fell in love afresh in that same beat. How could the last love of her life accuse her of not loving her enough? She wasn’t there when she left on trip after trip, scouring the world for any trace of her, speculating full on that she had long left it. She wanted to cry out at this, though found no tears. She had exhausted them, exposing herself to Vivi those nights ago.

 

Vivi shot her the look of an on-looker pitying a fallen bird, wanting to repair its wings though not sure how. “Come on, let’s get you out of the house,” she gestured for her to stand up proud.

 

“And go where? It’s my vacation still! I never get a day off!”

 

“Then you should go out not rot here in your own head.” Her adjurations were not left unheard. “Haseul, I think it’s time you meet someone.”

 

It was thus that Haseul was made to sit in some humdrum cafe not far from their home. One bland enough for dismal ‘meetings’ with potential suitors. Yes, she was being forced on a series of blind speed dates Vivi had set up. To protest them, she did what she did best: acted as mom Haseul. “Oh yeah, I love poetry,” she had begun to tell a well-polished young professor, suited up sleek. “I’ve been something of a starving artist though. Haven’t wrote anything since my last book that critics said ‘had the poetic flare of Joseon's greats’. Guess they mean I sound like old men,” she laughed brokenly, feigning her drink was some alcoholic beverage. She congratulated herself that she snuck in not one but two bad jokes before the career woman took flight.

 

The next woman, a part-time barista and full time animal lover didn’t last half as long. “Yeah, I’m definitely the maternal type. I already have like five, six kids,” she hyped over her non-caffeinated virgin drink. “Everytime I go out in the streets I come back with another kid.”

 

“You mean you collect stray animals and raise them? That’s so cute!” the young woman touched her hand endearingly. It was an endeavor in futility as Haseul would soon prove.

 

“No, no,” Haseul took another swing of from her mug, letting it spill over onto her lips and run down the side of her face most unappetizing. “Like actual kids. I just can’t stop having them.”

 

Observing from a table away, Vivi felt her engine go into overdrive. Haseul threw the most wrenches at her mechanism, always. She was hopeless, she thought.  Vivi had to admit, trying to get Haseul to move on with someone new, someone random might not be the best idea. Though you have to love the robot for trying. A robot only wished the best for someone she loved more than her inanimate self. Even if her happiness was here with the animate, alive in ways Vivi could never be.

 

***

 

She was hopeless, Kim Lip thought. What was she doing snooping out here, looking in on her? She had insisted to Jinsoul that they should head back from where they once came. She had put her feet down on it one second then dragged them first to a flat she now shared with Jinsoul then to Jinsoul’s class. Since when did a feral owl ever make a good pet? Since Jinsoul had tamed it adroitly as an astute android, conditioning the mind from will to whim. This docile Kim Lip wanted to go in, sit next to her and tell her she shouldn’t be toying with mortals. What did she know about dating though? She had only had one relationship of sorts prior and they didn’t exactly _date_.

 

“Hi, hi!” a voice too festive, happier than lovestruck youth greeted her with the look of someone she’s known since grade school. “Kim Lip, right?” Jiwoo dragged her along, making a best friend out of someone she didn’t know. “Come on in with me! Let’s be seatmates.”

 

The professor, coming in late also from a failed first date, was in no mood to delay the class further. “Those who just came in late, you’ll be paired up together. Congratulations, say hi to the person you’ll be going on dates with the rest of the semester.”

 

“Jiwoo, what the hell type of class is this?!” Kim Lip nearly yelled at her.

 

“Introduction to Dating 1201!” she chirped. “Oh look, Heejin and your girlfriend just got paired together too!”

 

***

 

It was hortatory of Jiwoo to bring it up, libel inducing even. “Are you sure you two aren’t dating? Because I swear you and Hyunjin would make the cutest-”

 

“Oh look! Our order is ready! Can you go get it Jiwoo?” Heejin stopped her there, sending her away on the task. By all goddesses, how did she end up on a double date with Kim Lip and Jiwoo and with Jinsoul as her date at this lame cafe? The goal of the class was to find ways to build relationships through practicing going on cheap dates. It was necessary in a world decimated by the disappearance of half its population. Though it was this very situation that Heejin found more Earth shattering.

 

Jiwoo had thought herself a genius. Since they had to limit their spending on such dates to a meager ten thousand won that could barely cover the cost of two drinks, why not pool their money and double date? She had suggested this idea that Jinsoul being Jinsoul wooed and ahhed at as Kim Lip went along and Heejin had no choice but submit to the majority. Jinsoul didn’t want to be without Kim Lip, Kim Lip wanted to beat up ever talkative Jiwoo half the time, and Heejin was afraid Hyunjin would get the wrong idea if it was just her and Jinsoul. All these inarticulated reasons made for the foursome’s own art of dating. One in which they would date together so they wouldn’t have to genuinely date at all.

 

“So,” Jiwoo was already on another topic when she got back with Kim Lip and Jinsoul’s sugar feast of drinks and Heejin’s plain coffee. “What do you think makes you two a good couple?” she asked Jinsoul, already feeling out that Kim Lip wouldn’t be the one to talk first.

 

Jinsoul sipped on her frothy drink smilingly. “We have the same sleeping preferences,” she answered straight out, leading Heejin to find that she had snorted some coffee up her nose in surprise. “We sleep at the same time, wake up at the same time. It’s comforting to have a roommate like that, you know? One you wake up in the middle of the night to kiss and-”

 

Kim Lip and Heejin both couldn’t tell who put a stop to Jinsoul first. Jiwoo with her dreamy head perched between her hands, entranced by honest Jinsoul’s words, would never come to know nor be able to fathom it all. The truth behind Jinsoul. A truth that would take her sometime to retell had she had want to. She had found out for herself that to survive in the human world, one must have this printed paper they considered currency. This false object of desire and inflated value akin to over glorified eternally unrequited love. To not be lost in the shuffle of the mundane humanness of interdimensional travel one had to stay resolute in their resolve. More persistent in landing on the right place on this less than immaculate earth than enthralled lovers beseeching fate to grant them not a lifetime of star-crossness. Human life was rough and material. Jinsoul was neither of those.

 

Though how could Jinsoul be expected to remember thus, shaken up by a fatal request she had permitted. She had stumbled on her own, with not a thing on her to help her out of the locked basement she had teleported to save an empty plastic bag full of water once home to a magnificent fish meant to be alone. Peering in on the water, she had seen a distortion in the back. The water pipe she used to break the window and run free. And run she did to the nearest building - an aquarium where Vivi and Haseul were on just another of their friendly outings. Not quite a date because they came back up not holding each other’s hands but Jinsoul’s, wet and confused. Now she was confused no longer, safe and secure first in the arms of friends and now her love from afar. Backed by Kim Lip’s caringness, her preparations for them both, Jinsoul did let on this much: “You know, I used to run in circles all the time. No matter how fast I ran, I kept finding myself, or rather another me, in the same place. It was a warped cycle. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break free.”

 

Jiwoo nibbled on her straw in attentiveness. Heejin threw hers aside asking, “And then what happened?”

 

“Someone told me to go see the world with a new set of eyes,” she have Kim Lip the gaze of a blue betta from behind it’s plastic confindes, knowing it was not her but another that was her liberator. “That’s why I’m here now.”

 

It had taken Jungeun cutting down every field of flowers of Eden and bringing them to Jinsoul to have her look at her as she did then. And no, this was not metaphorically at all. All the flowers she received from Jungeun making the gardens baren, suddenly closing their eyes for the last time just like them. Her feelings and heart fluttering for her, like her heart had already turned away locking them in memories, erasing each other from true existence. They were both lonely creatures. Really, really lonely. Lingering on Jinsoul’s untouched mouth was _‘Love me. Love me.’_ She had wanted her to swallow her undead heart, to hold her with the love she gave her. Her heart couldn’t bloom; neither of theirs could. The traces were fading in the time where they remained. It was a time when Jinsoul had seen the back of a woman leaving the forest, taking Kim Lip’s heart with her. She would never tell a soul. How could she if she wished to take her place?

 

“Wow, that’s sweet!” the unsuspecting Jiwoo played into Jinsoul’s mendaciously sweet rhetoric, same as all men and women alike would. “What about you, Lippie?” she called her by a name that had her shiver in the hot weather. She had a way of doing this intentional or not. Jiwoo was unhateable as she was unbelievably dote-worthy, while revealing nothing of her self. “What do you know about dating?” she readied her pen for note taking, so confident her new friends could teach her so much about human relationships.

 

What did Kim Lip know? She shrugged. Thinking back, one of the most romantic things she had done was soothe Haseul’s vomiting back. “It wouldn’t be so bad, just us two here for...a long time,” Kim Lip had said for herself, not noticing how off Haseul was. And perhaps that was just it: Kim Lip wasn’t there for Haseul, Haseul was there for Kim Lip. Her mind bore her back to when she still had her. She shouldn’t have backed up when Haseul had gotten too close. She had been bashful still. What a doll she was, still redder behind the ears than they were both green to love. “Can you stop looking at me like that?”

 

“Like what?” Haseul purposely annoyed her, running behind her to lodge herself on her back. Kim Lip rolled her slumped back back, straightening out to support Haseul’s light weight. She reached a finger back to poke Haseul’s blemishes, her imperfections though there were none. They both laughed and held each other closer. She cherished this feeling of her, this feeling of them: skin to skin, heart to beating heart.

 

Beat it did, Kim Lip’s heart going wild in present day had her not playing along with Jiwoo. “Jiwoo probably knows more about dating then all of us combined!” she turned her inquiry back on her.

 

Jiwoo, the practically newborn, laughed at this. What was a girl without memories to say? Yves’s Chuu on the other hand, would have too much to mention. Yves had a look for all seasons, a fruit for every soul. Chuu would excuse her ways with whataboutism, though neither Chuu nor Yves were present for the record. Had they been after class hours, Chuu would be adorned in her usual crepe, fit for morning while Yves sat by not minding a thing with the exception of her exceptional crêpes. They say that humans are the most selfish of all beings, but the selfish of the divinity they so worshiped beat them in this department twelve-fold. She couldn’t imagine Yves gnarled by age, gnarly as she may look, as she may be in unbespoken character. She had too much to live for where Chuu only had one. On the darkest of moonless nights, when Yves hadn’t snuck out for human company, Chuu would tap the tip of her nose, watching her other finger press into her malleable cheeks. She was her little play thing, she liked to think knowing full well that it was the other way around. She was hers.

 

“I don’t even know what love is,” Jiwoo tugged at her own ear in humbling admittance. “What about you, Heejin?”

 

***

 

Choerry was still here, asking the same question: why couldn’t Hyejoo see it too? The edge of the forest stretched on and on, imploring them to dare to explore another day. Choerry didn’t like taking it head on. She preferred periphrasis, staying in the periphery. She didn’t question nor say to Hyejoo what she feared straight on. Hyejoo though liked to cut down her boring borders. She had always been this way.

 

“Are you one of us? You can come closer. I don't bite.” Hyejoo alone with her same stubborn dandelion inquired. There stood Choerry and Hyejoo on their first meeting, a mirror’s length apart. Jungeun had told Choerry to stay away from the human contraption, though who could resist seeing a reflection not their own? So she had followed it here deep in the night, here to the source of her deep fascinations.

 

“I’m afraid not,” she admitted, putting the mirror down to her side. She had no need for it now that the solitary girl she was fond of staring at was staring her back face to face. The shower of stars that night was unstoppable. They drenched Choerry slowly, letting her fall into the moon. The inhabitants of Eden were not true goddesses, the in-betweeners knew this. How could she still deny the enchanting presence of Hyejoo though? So dark in figure, so light in person. Shadowy in the night yet bright in the sunrays. More powerful than any mortal and not powerful enough to blow out a dandelion. “Do you mind if I hang out here though? My little mirror thought you might need company.”

 

It was true. The Hyejoo then needed company almost as much as the present Hyejoo did. “You know what? Maybe it’s a good thing we’re all going our own ways. We are quite a different bunch, me and the unnies,” she stated to Choerry’s delight. It was the delight of a fruit bat, short-lived and knobbled away quicker than an overripe fruit left to rot, for the likes of the unwanted critter to nibble on. Hyejoo who continued to lead the way without knowing the way would go on saying, “The difference between us is if faced with some jerk in a bad situation Gowon would brush it off but cuss them out in her head, Chuu would call them a bastard, Yves would call them a dastard, and I would call them the ‘d’ word.” She was proud of her analyzation that made little sense to Choerry. “We’re essentially completely different people.”

 

Choerry the patient listener let her finish before capitalizing on only one thing from the speech, imploring with true innocence, “What’s the ‘d’ word?”

 

Hyejoo shot her a curious sort of look before laughing to herself this wide, wide laugh that had Choerry wanting to poke the crevasses her gloating cheeks made. What she wouldn’t give to always have her be this jolly. She enjoyed this Hyejoo luxuriating in badinage. So much so, she would play her fool any day.

 

“Something you wouldn’t like,” she said with an air of smuggled in her hidden knowledge that kept Choerry on the edge.

 

In Hyejoo’s sometimes incomprehensible words, Choerry saw how she was analogous to another. Another she had only seen briefly though she would leave more of a brief impression on her. She had either died a nameless poet lost to the winds of history, her story overshadowed by the endowments of her station. Either that, or she has been a peasant girl lucky to have caught enough glimpses of her masters’ writing to pick up a thing or two, picking up their spare writings to take into her grave as her own. Both were equally grave. Her name was Haseul, Choerry remembered this much for it was on the poetry book she had given to her. They were passerbyers. Haseul on her way out and Choerry on her way back in as Yerim, not yet awoken to her current calling. Passing strangers under the moonlight, Haseul still insisted she take the book, and when she finally cracked it open, she found it marked to one poem in particular that went like this:

 

_The moon is white on pear blossoms and the Milky Way tells the third watch._

_A cuckoo would not know the intent of a branch of spring._

_Too much awareness is a sickness, it keeps me awake all night._

 

The Milky Way wrapped around Choerry as it did with the person who penned the poem. She could have sworn it, she was not insane. Her song she had wanted to sing for all to hear was one of  transparent moonlight. But she didn’t really care now. Had Haseul all along been ready to reveal the hidden secret in her heart? Could she have been ready for the spilling light none could see forthcoming? If she was that prophetic, why’d she let herself suffer from some heartbreak that had her running out from a place that was all one could ask for, one stop short of paradise. Again, Choerry didn’t really care now. She let her fantasy with Hyejoo live on another night, bewitched by the unearthly melody that spun around her, leaving cares aside the moment it spread in her ears.

 

Hyejoo did this too. She fell asleep by Choerry’s side, not alone but alone. She dreamt a dream that only the combination of Hyejoo and Olivia could muster. She found herself in the abandoned building, long button up tucked in her neat skirt, already for what was to come. “Are you Vivi?” she neared the figure that couldn’t had foreseen her coming.

 

Her inhuman eyes glowed red as Hyejoo’s soon would. “How did you-”

 

“A little flightless birdy told me you’ve been wreaking havoc and I’m here to wreck you,” she wanted to say all heroically in the same grandness as her video game protagonists. Her heroes had died - that was to say she was no child. Yet she was. The heroes she spoke of were none other than coded video game characters who she had massacred herself. She was a kid still addicted to games though she didn’t like being played herself. Unsurprisingly to us, but to her shock, she was cut down before she could open her mouth. Her bravado had bordered on scoundrelly self-boasts. Vivi need not such. It wasn’t chemical but alchemical for a creature not quite human. And when Hyejoo respawned seconds later because she was angel were Vivi was demon, made from innocence where Vivi was invoked by sacrificial death, she knew she had to commit the greatest sin. She drew her hand up, and prepared herself for the kill.

 

“I’m being more egoistic than I have ever been,” she muttered to herself in her mind’s eye. Her nocturnal imagination had enough of her too. It let her be alone on a cush mattress weirdly placed in the middle of it all. A centerpiece to the violence that had led to the creation of Olivia and the death of Yves’s first true love. She couldn’t exactly envision herself striking the lethal blow. What she could recall was it staining Yves’s creation’s blonde hair vivid pink with its equivalent blood. There was another though who could spare her to hurt her more through and through, slicing at her sliver by sliver. That was none other than herself. She as Hyejoo. So she had chosen to let it all go, to pardon herself by giving up on herself. To let herself love herself by becoming another. Where Yves was pride and lust, Hyejoo was wrath and Olivia was greed and pride combined. Greed for a happiness she didn’t feel like she deserved, pride in herself for the spotless character she was in fiction.

 

It was a twisted fate of her own choosing, she couldn’t blame others. But resentment was more corruptible than all the previously acknowledged sins combined. It had her angered not by Chuu nudging her on, rather by Yves for starting it all. She was not infuriated with their creator though. No, it was beyond that. She was gone. A gone girl, a missing woman who no longer fully understood herself, and Yves had allowed her to be thus. She would have went on to lament in her dreamworld bed, had a person she had not seen in some time come to puncture her brooding.

 

“It’s been a while.” The young woman dressed identical as her, a woman who was her but wasn’t settled down by her side, embracing her with self-love. For you see, in these two bodies was one. “How have you been Hyejoo? I thought you...I thought you were gone for good.”

 

“Yeah, I was gone for some time,” she said in her sleeper’s mind, knowing not a word truly needed to be said between them. “How have you been, Heejin?” she hugged her back to ask. In that powerful clutch onto one another the human woman and her not exactly celestial _co_ saw through the other’s mind becoming one again as their memories catch up in sync.

 

It was there that Hyejoo released her sorrows, and Heejin did too with hers. The gravity of the situations seemed unequatable, yet they laid there still as ever, equals in every way. They were both perplexed, and while Hyejoo relayed her misgivings and mistakes to Heejin alone, Heejin too offered the rare glimpse into her mind. Truth be told, she hadn’t meant to kiss Hyunjin. At least not on the lips. She was a first timer in the dark. What would she know of lips on lips, only misses. Her miss had happened to be a gain, but for who exactly? They had only further shied away from each other after that.

 

“Woah, wait, how do you just accidentally kiss someone?” Hyejoo shoved her off with her burst of laughter.

 

“I don’t know! It was dark, okay? I just wanted to peck her on the cheeks but-”

 

“You got no aim because you don’t play games like me. And you ended up playing yourself because her lips were so soft and-” Hyejoo was quick to censor herself from further reading Heejin’s mind, speaking her inhibitions aloud. Her embarrassment was now her own. “And you can’t even talk to her now without feeling awkward, huh?” She didn’t have to wait to see Heejin look down. “Well, fuck,” she let out voicelessly. What had they both gotten into?

 

Curious how long forgotten truths manifested in dream while waking reality was besotted by falsehoods. Paradisiacal dreams may be in theory, they let souls meet who they were always meant to meet though feared to. She was everything she was not, but hoped to be. Everything she could never be because she so hoped so it deluded her into this vision of herself far from truth. Hyejoo wondered how far back they’d both have to go to find their original selves they had long discarded. She had the briefest glimpses of her past life then, a human life on earth transcending her Eden existence. She was in a special class of sorts. The first gaming animation class of its kind where she was from. She was the only female there from what her mind could reconstruct in this tidbit of memoria it chose to disclose to her at this random time.  

 

“What were they like?” Heejin suddenly asked her.

 

“Who?”

 

“Men?”

 

“Not worth mentioning,” and she turned the page at that.

 

“Do you think that’s why she did it? To find someone worth mentioning?” she implied about Hyejoo’s nemesis.

 

Instead of her, Hyejoo thought of another. As hard as she tried to conceal her thoughts, how could she disconnect herself from her own other mind? “I don’t want to talk about it,” she declared, warning Heejin to not push further. She distanced herself from her, taking the stairs to the rooftop, letting the fantasy world winds blow through her. She had made her way up to be alone, though Heejin couldn’t part from her. They were one and the same, staring back at each other on the rooftop. Hyejoo took a step closer to her, then felt faint. The dreamer coming to an awakening, she reached out for Heejin in a parting gesture, hoping they’d meet again in sleep.

 

She understood now why she so envied Gowon’s co, why she thought of Yves and Chuu’s relationship to be so self-centered. Had there not been them, had there not been Gowon and Hyunjin specifically, maybe Hyejoo would have searched for Heejin. No, she definitely would have. She would have held her in her hands, loving her for seeing her silly skills as true art on par with her own. How could one not love a better version of their self at their core. She had woken up every morning as Hyejoo being able to recall her dream visits with Heejin perfectly. It was unfair that Heejin couldn’t do the same as a simple human. Then again, she had abandoned her after all. Chosen to be a forgetful Olivia that wasn’t any better than a mere mortal, worse perhaps. Agreeing with herself to such, she knew she didn’t need Choerry by her side but another. The company of her own wretched being until she could better herself to truly be the match to ethereal Heejin once more. A girl who was more magical, more deserving of paradise than she herself in this present state.

 

When Hyejoo finally woke to Choerry’s side, she had only two sentences for her: “Don’t waste your time being my manic pixie dream girl. You’re so much more than that.” Choerry whose meliorism was evident in her every joshing step across the deceptive wasteland didn’t belong here. She was meant to spread her wings, her joys elsewhere. She was wasting her time here with Hyejoo. A deceased who  had stopped believing in the betterment of the future. She was now a Hyejoo who missed the explorer Choerry of the past. One who marveled by performing her function to a tee. She hadn’t been the Choerry who functioned with punctilio for a while now, not since she greeted Hyejoo in the gardens. Starting today, Hyejoo would remedy that. “I know you see the open gate that I can’t see. Take it, and go. You couldn’t have been transformed into Choerry just to babysit a sad wolf cub. Go do what you have to do. Let me here alone to think.”

 

***

 

She held the map upside down, forehead knotted in thought. With a cat sticker on her pointer finger, she waited for another version of herself who had already partaken in this quest to guide the way with the reflection of her hand mirror. She wasn’t let down and followed the light past a forgotten ferris wheel and on to an overpass. And when she ran fast enough, she was met with someone from her past, someone who would mean more to her in the future.

 

“You’re really here!” The woman on the other side of the bridge dropped her groceries and came running as well. They met not with hugs as was typical but with a mismatching high five instead that had them both wincing in pain. “How’d you come back here little bat? And as a girl too? Were you looking for me?” Hyunjin asked impossibly, with knowledge that no normal human with their magical abilities or not should have known. She asked it as if she was an all seeing feline, asking with the curiosity that would kill a cat.

 

 

* * *

 

**I’ll proof-read and edit later and have a short random bit next next update. I wanted to post this before passing out. But in the meanwhile please let me know what y’all think ^^ I know this chapter was super heady but there’s more action to come. Feel free to comment, give your reactions and more~**

 

**_Next chapter spoilers (in no particular order):_ **

 

Her incandescent face demanded attention.

 

In anti-Victorian and Elizabethan manner, she didn’t want to reign, simply to rule. She didn’t want to be a queen, only a princess.

 

Which is right: I see or saw you? Which is right: I love or loved you?

 

“Where did you get this?” she raged with memory, needing not an answer and already running off to meet up with someone who had waited for her in the shadows night after night.

 

“Wait until you’re a mom and see if you can treat your own kids as good as she treats you.”

 

“What are you talking about?” she enciphered more than she should have.


	6. Matches Not Made in Eden

**Chapter 6**   _in which dating class crew learns theology and meets someone, Yeojin is a brat, LipSoul may just be each other's soulmates if only.., 2jin decide on something, and Yves is no longer dancing alone_

* * *

 

 

“Psht,” Jiwoo nudged her seatmate with the tip of her pen just before class. “Lippie, did you read the article for class?” She was an eager student. But an eager student didn’t always equate to a good one.

 

Kim Lip, who wasn’t even technically enrolled in Jiwoo’s class but attended anyways to keep her new friends and Jinsoul company, struggled to sit up straight. Her morning coffee hadn’t been as effective as she’d hope. “It’s your homework, not mine,” she grumbled. Regardless, with a word from Jinsoul and more rousing from the steadfast Jiwoo, she relented. “Fine, I’m only giving you a quick summary though, okay?”

 

“ _Assa!_ ” Jiwoo fisted the air in victory. It caught the eye of yet another new student walking into class who sat down soundlessly by her side.

 

“They say an immortal left in isolation would come to no good for mortals. That’s why Yves snapped her fingers once and the fruits of knowledge and the power of death wishes came into being. Some say this was when immortals gained the ability to enter the realm of the living and all sorts of chaos began.” Kim Lip recited, a calm expression on her. How queer it was that humans in all their foolishness would get this much correct.

 

Jiwoo looked up from her feverous note taking when the answers to the day’s discussion were cut short from her. “What happened next?” she prodded her on, ears propped in her makeshift lecturer's direction.

 

“Wow, Kim Jiwoo, you must’ve not looked at the _Theology of Life, Love, and Death_ at all, huh?” Heejin said more in astonishment than jest. She had thought Jinsoul and Kim Lip would be the black sheep of the bunch. Turns out despite their reluctance to study, they still had one up on their new quirky friend. At least they read and comprehended. Though most found philosophies and divine theories hard to ascertain and accept, Heejin had never met a bunch who took so quick to it. She herself still found many principles befuddling and ambiguous. Say as ambiguous as many elements of this text itself even?

 

“Nah, I used to have someone read to me,” Jiwoo answered thinking of a shoulder she once leaned on, not sure where that answer had come from. She was still settling into life as this college student with no past. So where exactly did her surprising responses and flashes of memories more temporary than mirages stem from? She wished she knew too.

 

“What were you, a chaebol heir?” Jinsoul laughed. “If so, you should hurry and remember everything, and find your lost family and a bride. I’d volunteer myself! Take me!” her strange, almost rated humor came out. There were few who considered Jinsoul funny. Hers were usually the type of crude jokes that best stayed between friends, and for that reason, it was rare for strangers and acquaintances to see her as anything other than quaintly charming. Mysterious even.

 

“What?! No, you can’t!” Kim Lip butted in. On this trip she had found much sorrow, it was only now that she came to learn an inkling of the meaning of the word _‘jealousy’_ as well. So to indulge herself further in this new sensation, to leave the sadness of separation turned somberer reunion be a bygone, she concentrated on the task at hand. Going into a deep storytelling voice again, she resumed with, “Anyways, so Yves snapped twice and men vanished. Then she snapped one final time and human life was snapped in half.” She had let the words slipped past her tongue before perceiving their weight. It had taken the same amount of time for Jinsoul to look at her. After all, wasn’t it the joint sins of Jinsoul and Yves that had shaped the human world that they resided in now, propelling Kim Lip and others here with them?

 

A popping sound made by Heejin pulling out her lollipop distilled the clotted air, breaking Kim Lip and Jinsoul’s curious gaze at each other. “That Yves sure is something. _If_ she’s even real. I mean, come on. Even for petty goddesses, it’s pretty dark. How cruel, right?” she chattered nonchalantly.  

 

“No, I think it’s fascinating!” Jiwoo and the new girl next to her answered in unison. Had it not been for their professor coming in just then, they would’ve addressed this new presence. Classroom etiquettes long forgotten, she made a salon or makeup room out of her sitting space. She primped everything from her hair to her ruffled sleeves, primmer than a private school student. Her incandescent face demanded attention. Her face in her little hand mirror, she asked herself who it was adoringly.

 

She wan’t of the canaille, rather the owner of her own gondola being ferried up the wide canal all alone. It was for this that she was resented. If an actress is only as good as their last movie, then a royal is only as good as how their subjects last view them. And in all her subjects, Chaewon wasn’t exactly rubbing elbows with her classmates. Without an audience, she was no more than a lone button pom flower. Green with exception not extraordinary but extraordinarily isolated. In anti-Victorian and Elizabethan manner, she didn’t want to reign, simply to rule. She didn’t want to be a queen, only a princess. A voluptuary among her voluminous treasures - her infinite self-love and fanciful clothes and accessories. Albeit, it was all for not. Everything up to her crown-shaped hair piece was just gewgaw. She didn’t need the flashy bits to shine.

 

Who needed a Garden of Eden anyways when they themselves were the fruit? But even the most succulent of fruits required attention. When the class discussion morphed into individual work, without a partner, Chaewon could only turn to the ever-smiling girl by her side to help her out. Prose wasn’t her strong point. She knew a great deal of the old language but how to shift that into modern speech was still clunky for her, thicker than ice. “Which is right: I see or saw you?”

 

“Um, I see you.” Jiwoo flushed a tad. She really did see her for the first time, and long and hard too. If this new student was registered while Kim Lip still wasn’t, she might as well have them signed up as dating partners. She would make sure to see to the matter later.

 

“Which is right: I love or loved you?” the strange newcomer entangled Jiwoo into her captious question again.

 

She left Jiwoo flabbergasted. To answer her question would be to utter the words of affection to a total stranger. Having figured as much, Chaewon elegantly inscribed the answer, translating from a language most had forsaken into the common spoken tongue. Linguistics in a class about dating, articles about the history and meaning of life and death to boast. Who would’ve guessed? Certainly not Chaewon and Jiwoo or they wouldn’t have enrolled in the first place.

 

Never one to be on the losing end though, and perhaps more so out of desperation for a friend in a world that still made no sense to her, Chaewon ran after Jiwoo after class, holding her back from joining the other three girls. “What do you think of me?” She spoke straightforwardly with tintinnabulation, prettier to the ears than the wafting sound of fairy-esque chimes. “I like myself too,” she answered for Jiwoo. Seeing from her abnormally chipper classmate’s now mystified face that she had misspoken, she changed her approach. “Ah.” Most people would have apologized. Chaewon wasn’t most people. “Let’s be friends.”

 

And so it was that she joined the four friends at one of their quote unquote double dates, to their discomfort but also entertainment. “Why is this apple so spiky?” Chaewon complained of her pineapple smoothie. She seemed like a neophyte commoner drismally plucked from some branch of nobility, a new human being even. “Can I get Yves’ apple instead of this dessert?”

 

Jinsoul nearly choked over her bubble tea at the mention. “Can I talk to you for a second?” she pulled Kim Lip aside to voice her suspicions. Meanwhile, Heejin found the same timing to excuse herself. She still hadn’t quite made things right with someone she’d been meaning to talk to as well.

 

This left Chaewon with Jiwoo talking about their memory lost and new life here. Their takes on a fresh start. And wow was Chaewon refreshing. She was fantastic where Jiwoo was frenetic, fastidious where Jiwoo was flexible. Moreover, she looked as much the part of an ornate spendthrift as Jiwoo looked like a thrifty spender in her boxy sweaters and ripped jeans. Clutching on to this girl so different from herself, Jiwoo sought to charm the charming. “Hey, so I’m making bracelets for my new roomies as a thank you for letting me stay at their place while I figure myself out. Want to help me make one, as my _new date_?” she asked as though Kim Lip was no longer in the picture. To be fair, she was out of the scene at the second, still in some hot debate with Jinsoul.

 

“Sure, where are we going to get the gold and diamonds though?”

 

***

 

 _Click-clack, click-clack_ , went the keyboard to the clucking of an uninspired white bird. She was more a henpecking hen or dreary duck on this occasion than a majestic egrant or anything of the sort. Taking her writing as her spouse, she was its worst critic. Her second encounter with the professor who she had tried to shoo away on her blind date didn’t help. Who told the confident, well-educated, towering model of a sophisticated literati to come knocking at her door like that? (Probably Vivi to be honest.) She was the opposite of all who Haseul knew, telling her that her line of work was no bore. That she couldn’t more so enthrall her with her quotations, recitations, and dad jokes of dads who went extinct long ago. So why did she bother Haseul infinitely more than she could ever please or even amuse her? Someone had finally come knocking on her door, someone with no past connection to her, and yet all she wanted was to back out. And back up she did, deleting near the entirety of her morning’s writing. She would have backspaced on all her work had it not been for Vivi, her unofficial amanensi, halting her destructive hand.

 

“Why are you so bothered? I mean, I guess it would make sense if you’re bothered that Professor Lee Jieun is way out of your league,” teased the robot. If even a robot could assess the conventional attractiveness of a human, than they must be quite the looker. Nevermind quite the persona.

 

Haseul wished the holographic screen she was typing onto was a bonafide laptop. Swiping the screen away in the direction of Vivi’s face didn’t have the same effect as throwing a solid object at her. Not that she could ever hurt Vivi.  

 

It was unfair that Vivi could read her mind. She smiled acquiescently at her, prickling Haseul in a way as to not truly frustrate her but doing enough to garner attention. “Remember our short-lived trainee days when we all tried to live the K-pop dream? How we’d practice the same routine for months on end just for you to never be satisfied?” she drew her thought away from the present with these words. “Before we all quit and you got a job, you use to go on little dates with me when Heejin and Hyunjin went to high school.” When she didn’t want to be alone missing Yeojin, and missing someone other than Yeojin, Vivi failed to add. “Weren’t things nicer back then?” came the rhetorical question ringing in their minds, leaving them not.

 

“When I first took up residence here and found you, the ageless landlady, I’d ask you why you chose to stay here all this time. You remember, right?” Haseul asked her back instead.

 

“I remember everything,” Vivi liked to believe, knowing she didn’t. What a time it had been, her running on a track of her own making not unlike Jinsoul. She had circled it time and time again all in an effort to make her heart beat faster. ViVi, who ran and ran until her chest was running, finally stopped in a strange way. She had stopped where she began, in front of a set of stairs once leading to a bowling alley turned skating rink and at last cramped multi-story housing. She had looked up and found familiarity in a new face. “I remember everything, especially if it concerns you.” That was true. She was uxorious for her, though on the surface, they were no more than roommates in name.

 

Touched, Haseul took a moment in contemplating silence before saying, “You said you were waiting for something or someone, you just weren’t sure what or who though. Wouldn’t it be nice to stop waiting?” she asked of herself as much as for Vivi. Perhaps what she could never achieve through neither pen nor speech was this yearning. A yearning for an Elysian paradise where the evergreen grass could show her how to be green once more.

 

Vivi met her proposal with that same mild gentle smile that had the most amiable of mothers moved. “Would you stop waiting with me?” She offered her hand over to hers. She had almost gotten to her point and coaxed more than a smile back out of Haseul when the front door slammed open.

 

“I’m back!” Yeojin threw down her backpack to announce. “Can you two stop being gross and like make dinner or something?” This was worse than the denouncement of a negligent guardian, it was adolescent ignorance, youthful rudeness that had Haseul quaking with anger.

 

“Yeojin, go to your room!”

 

“But-”

 

It would take an almost all-knowing neutral third party to mend the raft. Vivi’s equanimity was admirable. It was the cool of a robot that no hot-headed human could match. Though in all her fairness, she was still flawed. She was biased. No machine made with selfish intent could not be. “Wait until you’re a mom and see if you can treat your own kids as good as she treats you,” she whispered to Yeojin, bringing her the backpack she had casually discarded along with her care for Haseul.

 

“What are you talking about?” Yeojin enciphered more than she should have. She wasn’t a child with senseless questions any longer. She was a skeptical adult determined to obviate the obvious queries left purposely unresolved. This, however, was the one single department where Vivi could not indulge her.

 

***

 

 _The codependency and coexistence theory really takes ‘she loved herself by loving her’ to another level,_ Jinsoul typed out. A back hug, a simple gesture by someone who never granted her such had her frozen with surprise. When Kim Lip then took off her hood and winked at her, Jinsoul hadn’t felt that hookwinked ever before.

 

“What are you up to?” Kim Lip asked for her attentiveness, her affection casually as she could.

 

No. Should she just call her Jungeun now that her eye had stopped glowing as fervently? Had Jinsoul cooled the blaze by repeatedly telling Kim Lip of how well-adjusted Haseul was to her human life? That her presence and even Yeojin’s were birds fluttered away from a heart that no longer required fluttering? She hated being the devil’s advocate. But that was precisely her role as the unnamed entity that had once aided Yves herself, wasn’t it? “I’m writing up my report about _cos_ and the theory of soulmates.”

 

“Oh,” Kim Lip pretended to understand.

 

“Do you know what a soulmate is?” Jinsoul called her bluff.

 

“Yeah, of course,” Kim Lip cleared her throat, suddenly regretting she had let Jinsoul talk her into staying on earth a bit longer until Jinsoul found whatever it was she was looking for on her quest. Indulging in humanly exploits like questioning the meaning and existence of a greater love was counterintuitive. What could be more intuitive than love? Or so one would think. “Like...a soul...that you mate with?” The millisecond in which this was stuttered out, she witnessed a Jinsoul she had never seen before. She had never known Jinsoul to be a shrinking violet. Not the same way Jungeun was violently so. Shyly screaming with laughter and wanting to deface anything in sight to hide her ever reddening face.

 

Jinsoul was a Jungeun cognoscente, knowing her by scent, sight, feel, and feelings. She deciphered her, dissected her, better than Jungeun herself could. Reducing the comminuted bits of Jungeun into soil in her hands, fertile for her purposes. And her purposes alone. Now, she once again saw more Jungeun than Kim Lip and found joy renewed. How precious this innocent girl was. A million years old, but a million years young. She remembered her then, the broad-chested girl upon the cliffside shore. Between them that night was a blooming light. She knew she’d never be the same for having stared at her bareness, her fresh to the middle world state. Their hearts had headed towards each other until she was in her arms because she was about to lose control.  _Cos_ existed to give a guiding light through opposition. But that night, the only thing that stood in opposition of their new acquaintanceship was chaos. It was chaotic. Non-beating hearts beating off time, chaotic. Relaying to Jungeun what it meant to be an in-betweener, to not be dead nor alive, had Jinsoul trapped in her own maze all night going psychotic. She wanted her, she was falling into chaos.

 

“You okay?” Kim Lip, no, Jungeun felt her head in the here and now. Kim Lip too had been in a whole other type of chaos over love. Though this other chaos felt entirely different. Rapturously inviting in place of the excruciating unwelcomeness she had felt in the company of another. She didn’t want to speak of it again, of them again. Jinsoul had told her it would be easier not to, to keep in mind a world of only them two. She could do that for now, calling Jinsoul’s stratospheric universe of joy theirs for the sharing.

 

“No,” Jinsoul couldn’t wipe the glee from her face, the shy from her eyes, the chaos from her heart. “Baby, I’m going chaotic,” she held Jungeun’s face, finding no way out of her delirium. The countless lights still dizzily wrapped around her from that initial meeting until now. “I think I’m going psychotic,” she unintentionally rhymed, finding the rhythm between her and the person she’d like to call her soulmate. Someone she loved more than her Gundams, someone she wanted to give love letters to if only she was skilled at writing. “Sorry, babe. I’m just so...so chaotic right now,” she repeated yet again in her hysteria. She closed her eyes and saw nothing except Jungeun again. By all goddesses was she a mess.

 

Her battology didn’t bother Jungeun one bit. Once on the edge of the forest far from the gardens, there was a lake like no other. Where there were now mirrors had stood a reflective body of water, big enough to drown out the sorrows of the immortals. And there they had found each other. Jungeun’s natatorial shoulders perfect for leaning on even then. Running through time, following that sound they caught up with each other in the moment. Following that light that first led them on, Jungeun whispered something to Jinsoul that was only for their ears alone. Her eyes were on her heart. The melody that entranced them then as it did now passed by and by. It pulled them together to be true to one another, over the kitchen island seats, on top of the marble where they marveled on top of each other. And without another word said, their lips met. Softly, slowly at first, curiously, chaotically next, until an apple was knocked over from the fruit bowl and tumbled down.

 

More curiously, the apple didn’t quite fall. It was all thanks to the existence of one person in particular. Someone more mystifying than the sower of seeds. She was the catcher in the apple farm, having perfected the most impossible of catches. “Careful. You could be risking a life there,” the sudden manifestation from the purple dust percolated in her nonsensical way, being sensible to none but she herself. Her two companions had been incidentally disenfranchising her by not letting her in on their worldly quest. Choerry didn’t mind though. She was here now, crashing their island crashing. She’d found her roseate goal, resonating in trifecta harmony. Red, blue, and purple perfecting a new circle.

 

***

 

A single door between them and a world apart, Heejin held the phone to her mouth closely. Almost afraid another would overhear, slashing her confidence prematurely. Since when was she this frightful outside of a horror movie screening or mock haunted house? Sounding of a non-nimble tepid hare rather than a lively loving rabbit, she started softly saying, “You know, it’s been a long day.” She touched her hand to the thin front door, so sure Hyunjin was on the other side of it but needing assurance.

 

“Yeah, I haven’t seen you today,” Hyunjin replied just as timidly. How novel it was for them to go about a day not seeing each other until the afternoon. They were no different from romance novel first loves in this regard, inseparable until leading up to the moment of bashful awakening, realization and acceptance. Though they had been apart for more of the day than less, Heejin was always around her somewhere, Hyunjin was sure. She looked at her more than anyone, but perhaps they both wanted to go on teasing each other a bit longer. No, what was she doing? She should just let Heejin in like Haseul had yelled at her to do instead of standing by guarding the door. Hyunjin wasn’t playing hard-to-get but bad girls will be bad girls, and she was feeling vicious. _Watch out,_ she wanted to warn Heejin. Watch out because she wouldn’t let her in just to let her give her the cold shoulder again.

 

It won’t be easy. It would never be easy for there were quite many secrets even between the two best of friends, closest as there could be to soulmates if such existed. “Look,” Heejin said as a starter, though Hyunjin really did peep through the peephole at her. “I’m sorry I’ve kinda been ignoring the topic of... _you know,_ ever since... _you know._ ” She wanted to kick herself. “I didn’t want to pass my love on to you so easily,” she hesitated then saved some pride for herself saying, “because I’m special, you know?”

 

She should’ve said ‘ _because you’re special’_ but it wasn’t something she was capable of without burning herself of shame on the spot. So instead, Hyunjin corrected her saying, “No, you mean because I’m that pretty girl, right?” She wanted her to struggle to tell her, to show her, to make herself more anxious. But she let her off at that, opening the door so they could hug it out. And somehow, words not needed, they ended up on the couch, innocently in the arms of the other. Heejin’s small slender outreached hand to block the last of the protruding sunlight was matched with a much larger protective one, shielding them both. The shade from the tree that was her outstretched hands with her long fingers as full branches kept them both cool.

 

“Are you flirting with me right now?” Heejin had to ruin the moment by making fake jabs at Hyunjin. When the latter was too skittish to make a comeback, Heejin went on saying, “What am I saying? Most of our friends are married with kids already. We’re literally middle-aged unweds.”

 

“Do you want to get married?” came the obvious question.

 

“Wah, are you proposing to me just like that right now? Out of the blue when we’re like not even dating or any-”

 

Hyunjin leaned in, this time embarrassing Heejin into silence for a turn. She had full intention to finish what they had started more than a week ago now, that was until she couldn’t push herself on and backed off. She wanted to bury herself in her hair. “Help me,” she pleaded. “I can’t do this alone.”

 

With a soundless soft laugh, Heejin helped her out and very intentionally met her lips. They would have stayed like this, lips pressed to tender lips, tasting what it was that they so loved about each other for a long, long time. Communicating with contact what their years of words exchanged in banter, in silly wrath, in love, all could not. They would have had it not been for a pesky roommate.

 

“Where did you get this?!” Jiwoo screamed at anyone in the apartment who would listen. In her hands was a piece of unmistakable clothing, and in her head was the mind of Chuu, fully restored. She raged with memory, needing not an answer and already running off to meet up with someone who had waited for her in the shadows night after night.

 

The jacket with the appurtenances of a stud galvanized Chuu into hastened sprint. _Your deity puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, ‘do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple’. Surprise, surprise,_ Yves had said to the recipient of her first apple. Her first kill and collect. Her first self-made love. Her extension of herself that wasn’t her. Chuu had fallen for the self-written myth that she was special, yet here she was: just another girl who fell from Eden. There was one thing that was different though - she didn’t truly need an apple after all. Only the scent of a jacket to follow. The new her had learnt about her anew. But would it be this way always? A girl who blooms with love would find it hard to turn down the gardener's seed. She had fallen for her, fallen to Earth for her. Would she let Yves plant another flower in her, to rise with their joint bloom?

 

 

Yes. Yes, she would.

 

***

 

It had been the usual banter for Yves. One, two hours passing by in this college classroom where she was the senior waited on upon and beloved by all. Wait. Something was strange. “Hi, I’m Yves. You must be a new freshman. Can I get your number? I can show you around,” she offered her unrefusable service.

 

“No thanks,” said the girl in black and white, spurning her in a way no living nor dead creature had ever been able to do. A quick heartless rejection and the elevator door was shut, cutting Yves off from her prey prematurely.

 

And that was it. That was all there was to it. She would be hers. She would make sure of it. Who knew just a little push to send the grieving girl tumbling was all it would take? Humans were so fragile, the immortal would find out. One second this girl was at the funeral of her mother watching the casket be lowered and the next with a single touch of Yves’s invisible finger, she was also sent downwards. But no, she would not be gone forever. Rather birthed anew. That’s what Yves’s apples were for, they had soon both learned after that.

 

 _How do you feel?_ she would ask the first of her creation from time to time, ensuring her spell over her remained in tact. The moonlight was getting heavy with time while the flow of time itself changed. How Yves in her solitude now wish Chuu could give her more messages now, talk to her before the time ran out. She had been so shy upon their actual first encounter. Not as Jiwoo and her classmate those countless years ago, but as Chuu and her Eve in an Eden needing no Adam. Chuu would have said something indiscernible to Yves’s question. Singing her praise, professing her less than coy love waiting for the day when her obvious words would somehow be made different. Yet, there had never been that day for they had never had a parting since the moment of Chuu’s ethereal conception.

 

Now, all Yves could ask for was no final goodbye as she feared there had been one. The days of their child’s play turned into a night that seemed to conceal her useless trembling. What was the purpose of her eternal dance if there was no muse to see it? The lovers of old shared a bridge decorated with a rainbow of twinkling stars. Through her dance for two missing a partner to join her in the rusty, dusty, lonely Hong Kong nights she had lost count of, she could only beg for Chuu to find her. To hold on to what was between them in the moments Yves had showed enough of her love and affection to her, to not miss it nor let it go. She very much wanted Chuu to tell her, to tell her anything she wanted. Anything she wanted to see, to feel, to do. And it would be hers.

 

She had missed her. Mourning every inch of her excessiveness. She even missed her random late night questions. Questions like: _“How do you always manage to sneak out without Teacher noticing?”_ a tiny Chuu would pop up from her sheets to ask mid... _well._

 

“The same way you always manage to sneak into my bed,” she would answer before pushing her back down. But she wouldn’t push her away anymore. Not even for the creature comfort of a humanoid creature that often questioned her not. She had been bored by Chuu once, sought real love way from her. But how could one deny the perfection that was a _co_? How could she have turned away an unintentional soulmate for a manufactured on that could do no wrong? It was Chuu’s flaws and differences from her that gave her a character none other possessed. A lively clingliness even an all-powerful being couldn’t bestow upon an animated lover.

 

Then, there it was _finally_. The other half of her dance reciprocated by her missing half. The sweet warmth that left her breathless. This was it. This was the moment right then, Yves thought. How did Chuu like her now? Was it still the same? They ended their dance with parallel flapping hands as wings flying high together though centimeters apart. It felt like they might touch. Just might. For the long awaited reunion. In the back of Yves’s mind would be good old Chuu wrapping her arms around her, holding her. What was her hesitation? Why hadn’t she done it already? For now, Yves took only one step closer to her, face to face. Slowly closing in. _How do you like me now? Could you tell me?_ she asked of Chuu, tilting her head up and leaning down.

 

It was the time of Yves. A time of a new eve for them both. _You know that by marking you my equal, I’m depriving your original match of a co, right?_ Yves had once revealed to Chuu shortly after her creation.

 

 _Nah, what’s wrong with that? It was probably some worthless guy anyways. I’d fall in love quick and fall out of it quicker. Better dead and forgotten._ She was sinister. Wicked as her creator. Yves very much approved. If they should both be convicted of connivance, so be it. And today, they would both sin some more.

 

Yves and Chuu, the creator and her first original creation. She and her, without anyone knowing, in their own small chat unhearable and unseeable to us humans. Them together growing inside each other. The tip of Yves’s tongue grew sweeter whenever she said Chuu’s name that she had given her. A name taken from the sound of a kiss being blown, the new life she had breathed into her. With their less than typical of conversations, the smallest of feelings had festered. And Yves now could keep talking about them, about her on and on.

 

Either the world was filled with mythomanias or it was a maniacal world of myths that they all lived in. Yves didn’t mind either way. She was of the clerisy. Perfect among the likes of Eve in _Killing Eve_. Though she was no agent for peace looking for joy. She was the impossible hitwoman finding quick thrills in others deaths. That was until there was this thrill of reconciliation that trumped all.

 

Not needing to hear another word, Chuu scudded to her, a flightless bird driven by it’s winded heart. Why talk any longer when they could kiss, and more? In her human life as Jiwoo, she had never found moments to be striking humdrum, yet looking back now, they all seemed dull, draining, mundane, monotonous. Now it all made sense.

 

If Yves would write as masterfully as she could read and encipher, she would be a masterful author subverting attention by having the most dramatic action happen off screen, or merely not having it happen at all. Only alluding. That was to say there was frisson in their friction. Moving against each other, with each other. It was a joy that lasted night after night, from one day until another until some form of sense found Yves once again.

 

“What took you so long?” she held Chuu back to ask at last. “You wouldn’t have forgotten who you are if you were sinless.”

 

 

* * *

 

**Will add on a bit and proof read + edit later but pls do share, comment, and lmk what you think~**

 

**_Next chapter spoilers (in no particular order):_ **

She was prevaricating, pretending to be innocent as a lamb up for slaughter when she was in fact a conniving old bird.

 

“It’s the actress who plays the character, not the other way around.”

 

“Aren’t you playing with me right now though?”

 

“You don’t mind it though.”

 

“What really happened Jinsoul? Why were you in the basement?”

 

“I’ve seen things you can only imagine.”

 

“Oh please. I’ve watched rated things before.”

 

“What?! No, that’s not what I-”

 

She had to admit it. Admit that she had missed her all along more than she had ever let on. So why then did she leave?


	7. The Poetries of Youth

**Chapter 7**   _in which Chuuves learn more about each other than they had known before, 2jin are gross, Kim Lip asks Jinsoul to tell her what she doesn't already know, Haseul has more family issues, and Choerry comes to play..or not_

* * *

 

 

“What are you talking about? Are you really accusing me of doing something against your will?” Chuu laughed off. She was prevaricating, pretending to be innocent as a lamb up for slaughter when she was in fact a conniving old bird. June’s full moon shined on her lie, illumination the ill-fated lustrous girl tempting her own luck. She was silly to think she could do this. The Purple Moon, or Strawberry Moon as it’s often called, came to when wild strawberries were at their ripest, allowing finders to pick them at will.

 

“Look at me then, and remember,” Yves held her face up to her scrutiny and with eyes demanding surrender, she surrendered Chuu to a fate neither could have predicted for the night. She forced her to remember, to recall it all in perfect memory and some. To relearn history de novo. In her cruelty she needed answers more than she needed Chuu. So it was that Chuu saw herself now not as Yves’s Chuu but a normal college student Jiwoo long, long ago. A mourning Jiwoo rebuffing not only tissues offered by male students but also the aid of a very popular, very novel Soojung.

 

Had she ever mustered the courage to talk to Sooyoung, or believed she stood a chance with the womanizer, she would have found her with peculiar reading in hand. Though Yves meant love to humans, Aphrodite meant death. And love in a maze of death for Yves’s forte, her foreplay even. Roleplaying as mortal Sooyoung, she had then been engrossed with _Aphrodite Means Death_ taking the Penguin Classic with her from class to home and back. How strange the writing was that all one could decipher was a blur only slowly being brought into focus as characters who were at first at odds and dubious of each other also came to see the clearer, bigger picture. It was a story of trust as much as it was about mistrust. Cap it off with the whimsical trademark oversized penguin on the cover, and there you have it: just the stuff to engross a lunatic goddess.

 

Though that day, there was something that captivated her more. A girl in distress, clearly an unplucked strawberry of a jem. Yet she avoided her more than penguins avoided their predator. What gave her such courage? No, it wasn’t courage. It was oblivion, and Sooyoung would remedy that. Yves had given humankind knowledge that Pandora’s box couldn’t eclipse. Sooyoung would do the same for this girl that defied her, redefinining her game of the swan princess and those she lured. She followed her after class, finally taking into account her odd clothes. She was grieving, but over who? Human lives were so wretched, so strabilious, it could be anyone really.

 

It wasn’t just anyone for Jiwoo though, it was the one and only person who mattered most to most mortals. Something that Yves in all her wisdom couldn’t quite fathom still in her infinite age. She saw the lady pictured on the headstone, gleeful smile outmatched by Jiwoo’s usual smile alone. Now that she was cast in gray for the rest of eternity, Jiwoo grayed with her, bawling in a way that pained a heartless goddess to see. This poor little match girl with no one left in the world who would call her their own. The girl so loved was all alone. The goddess who played with hearts now wished she had one to share. It was all as paradoxical as eventuating events not set in stone.

 

Oh so touched, Sooyoung reached out to her with not the gentleness of a sympathetic mortal but the accidental brute power of careless goddess Yves unaware of her own sadness's potency. And there it was, the force that knocked Alice down the rabbit hole, the push that landed Jiwoo on the coffin of her mother. What was worse to know was that she didn’t die on contact but rather from fright, a heart attack at the age of twenty. That ripe age of a gashina, perfect for learning all about the world and seeing it with fresh adult eyes, eyes as plentiful as those of strawberries now shut for eternity.

 

More robust than a track star, the murderer ran and ran. She ran until she was at the edge of the world, at the edge of the forest. “Help! Help me! I need to save her! I need to bring her back to life somehow!” she had called out to trees, the plants, the purple sky now mixed with bloodied red so dark it stained in dark hues closer to blue. She had come to the right place, for it was not in the in-betweeners’ nature to refuse help.

 

Her answer came in the hands of a transformed Jinsoul, blonde hair draping over her glistening body. It was Rene Magritte’s green apple that she held in her hand. An apple as capable of taking away identity as it was giving a new one. “She won’t be who she used to be. She won’t have any memory of such once you give her the fruit,” Jinsoul tried to warn her.

 

Yves didn’t need warning. She needed a quick solution for her guilt. Had she known that her quick fix would lead to her own eternal remorse, she would have reconsidered. Goddesses were sillier than humans to assume that they could mend all with a touch of magic. Apple half-bitten and the other half stored in the depths of a place where only death knew, it was thus that Jiwoo became Chuu. And centuries later when she would go on to whisper to Gowon that Yves attacked her heart, Gowon would scoff where as Yves would look down on her book and bite her lip in guilt-written fashion.

 

It was best that Chuu didn’t know what she didn’t know. She adored Yves’s ardor and spoke of her only in panegyrics, praising each flaw as though it was a perfection. The same flaws that robbed her of her life elevated to high standing. It would make even a human cynical, rude where they should have been extra kind to make up for their blunters. “Isn’t she great?” ogling Chuu would say of her creator, offering her praise like worshipers offering prayer. She would take any of her denigration, any of her mistakes with no disgust. Perhaps it was this that disgusted Yves most.  

 

Why was Chuu making more excuses for her absences than Yves could ever for her behavior? The strict Teacher spirit here to supposedly lecture them into some form of higher perfection (to cleanse them of impurities so they could ascent higher to who knows where) could of have a field day with her had Chuu not constantly intervened, masking her earthly field trips as sick days. “She caught a cold from me!” she’d say though none of them had been sick since the day of their immortal birth. “It’s my fault! I lost my flower in the garden and she ran to help me retrieve it,” she’d expertly excuse Yves for having sullied socks on another occasion. The derelict garden gates worn by Yves’s use more than time could ever rust it stood testament to her deceit. The Teacher was more worn by Chuu’s convenient lies than all of Gowon’s eye-rolling or Hyejoo’s frustrations could ever test her. How foolish this Chuu girl was to wave in valediction validating Yves late nights out.

 

Once, humans had been another portion of Yves’s victuals and she was voraciously unsatisfiable.  Now, she was wanted something fresh. Someone who couldn’t soulfully glorify her because she had taken her soul as her own, storing it in her fruits. Someone who wouldn’t remind her she had sinned. Had Chuu known, perhaps she wouldn’t have been so jealous. Had Chuu known, perhaps she wouldn’t have sent Hyejoo to terminate her competition. But what was done was done.

 

“You...killed me,” a newly awoken Chuu with all the memories of Jiwoo cried saying, not getting out the pinnacle of her realizations. She knew it now what she had deluded herself of before. Before the death of Vivi, she had never loved her. Only pitied her all the while blaming her for her regret and anguish. Yves was selfish despite her offerings of fruit; Chuu had known. Never would she have guessed that she could’ve done all this to her. Make her live as a fool knowing only her and nothing of the extent her monster.

 

“You made me kill Hyejoo. You made me leave her alone,” Yves fought back, running now faster than she had ran to save Jiwoo. She had already condemned one person to hate her for time everlasting. She couldn’t deal with another. Not considering who Hyejoo was to her, to her and Chuu alike.

 

***

 

She couldn’t believe Jiwoo. She had said she would make bracelets to show her love, propelling a jealous Heejin into overdrive. Taking Jiwoo’s idea of a proposal of love into a confession of her own. Now she was nowhere in sight having casted her friends aside for who knows what reason. This left Heejin here with Chaewon, sitting on plans they had had for the three after Kim Lip and Jinsoul had texted saying they couldn’t make it. What a corker she was this quirky Chaewon making friendship bracelets as if they were elementary school besties instead of newly acquainted college classmates. Heejin didn’t think of her as tawndry any longer. She must genuinely care, she thought. Her handiwork was quite exceptional despite her delicate looks. One could say she was meticulous in her craft, measuring out lines of thread as aptly as an actress rehearsing her lines. That was, until she gave out the sigh of a discontent lady. “Where in the world is Jiwoo?” Chaewon bemoaned her lonesomeness.

 

“I don’t know,” Heejin shrugged. “She was in the bedroom looking for thread in Vivi’s drawers one second then running away like a madwoman the next.”

 

“Well, what are we going to do with all the ingredients?” the latest of their friends eyed the filled-up kitchen asking. Heejin had mentioned something about wanting to cook dinner and Chaewon had wanted to know what _‘cooking’_ was. Not knowing what ingredients to buy to bring over, she had bought everything. Now the bags upon bags of groceries lied piled up until they nearly hit the low ceiling. Clearly more of a fire hazard than she and uncoordinated Heejin combined. “Guess we should wait for her, huh?” she sighed again.

 

“JEON HEEJIN!” they suddenly heard the deep roaring bellow from the bedroom.

 

Unmoving Heejin had Chaewon asking, “Shouldn’t you respond to her? Or go check to see if something’s wrong?”

 

“Nah. She already did that one time like five minutes before you got here while I was watching TV. She just likes testing to see if I’d respond but a bunny doesn’t come twice when called, and I’m no foolish bunny,” Heejin prided herself, pushing up her circular glasses. She had been a fool for Hyunjin in the past, being at her beck and call, so worried that she couldn’t be left alone. Hyunjin calling her name when she wanted water or the AC to be adjusted in the middle of the night, when she wanted her attention before the class ended, when she wanted to make her follow her through the crowd of admirers, etcetera. She wouldn’t let the nettlesome girl pester her anymore though there was more than something going on between them now. They weren’t just girls who were just friends with each other anymore, she had tried to explain to Chaewon earlier much to her failure.

 

“Puppy, are you going to come?” they heard Hyunjin demanding again. Chaewon, oblivious as she was, took this as her cue to leave and come back another day. A day when Heejin was much less red in the face and her body didn’t tingle such from hearing the pet name. Their name calling had reactivated Chaewon’s mysophobia, somehow reminding her she loathed other couple’s love the same as she hated contamination.

 

When Heejin made it to Hyunjin and saw her tittering away at the fact that she had come, she threw a stuffed plushie at her. “What?!” she yelled at her harmlessly, though picking up another plushie for good measure. Her wide glaring eyes didn’t have an infinitesimal chance of scarring Hyunjin and she knew it.

 

Hyunjin frowned her long-gone mother’s frown, effectively softening up an armed Heejin. “I got lonely.” It was true. She had saw an old friend yesterday who left her feeling more puzzled than ever. She left as soon as she saw her and they made their greetings, vanished as if by thin air. Had she been lonely enough to conquer her up?

 

Illusions notwithstanding, her words did have their desired intention. “You could’ve left the room and joined us instead of being antisocial all up in here alone,” she chided her softly, already climbing up to her bunk wanting to hold her. She reminded her so much of someone, she just couldn’t remember who. It truly was the worst form of deja vu.

 

That strange thought thrown aside, here they were, more than friends and yet not having the courage to hold each other or touch hands as if affection was lava and skin contact led to combustion. (Even their robot friend could tell them it wasn’t so if she was there.) They were both perfervid like this, sticklers to passion that they couldn’t carry through. They were perfectly vivid friends yet profusely blurry girlfriends...if they were anything of the sort. After their second kiss the other day Heejin had asked if this meant they were official dating now only to have Hyunjin stand up and leave her in a blushing haze, asking if she kissed everyone she was just friends with. What a disaster they were.

 

“I didn’t feel like playing around,” Hyunjin noted in an upset way uncharacteristic of her.

 

 _It’s the actress who plays the character, not the other way around,_ Heejin had overheard Chaewon criticising the poor actress in the movie they saw in class. They had been allowed to bring in snacks for the viewing that day and snack they did. Their shared soda’s effervescence was bubblier than Jiwoo on a good day, so refreshing that Heejin who found melodramas to be mediocre wished Hyunjin was there to see it too. Maybe it was her unexpected tears during that screening that caused the convenience store food to be sorid instead of sapid, urging her to personally cook something for her and Hyunjin both. Someday.

 

“Aren’t you playing with me right now though?” Heejin accused Hyunjin, reaching out her thin hand to push Hyunjin’s head. Instead, her hand was met and held. How great it was that they weren’t alone though they both had no next of kin. When a very shocked Jiwoo had asked if Heejin was okay that movie day, Jinsoul had answered frankly to leave her be. She was too deep into the predictable movie, one about friends who grew up together thick as thieving goddess Yves’s fruit branches, separated by years spent studying abroad in different countries only to reunite.

 

“You don’t mind it though,” Hyunjin nearly cracked a grin. They could spend the mundane together with no disdain. Hyunjin had been napping until recently, late in the afternoon on a Sunday. She had opened her eyes that she had closed and suddenly felt like she was in a new world. This melody that called her was none other than Heejin’s gruff laugh on the other side of the door. She had called out to her to annoy her, to make sure she was there. It was that inexplicable pull, the strange landscapes and sunset streets they’d yet to explore together. Her smile spreading hearing Heejin’s _“What?”_ back. She was her Sunday alright. She wanted to be her love on this special day too, to be frozen in time in their Sunday love. To remember the memories they’d make together like they’re born again. So she’d head towards that melody, their melody, with confidence for once. Because everything was precious, because everything fluttered like her heart feeling like it was going to burst, she finally asked, “Do you want to like...you know...like…”

 

“Goddess damn it! Yes, I’ll go out with you!” Heejin nearly screamed in her impatience. She took Hyunjin’s free shaking hand in hers and steadied it against their two other entwined hands not because she had been entrusted to, but because she had always wanted to.

 

 _Take her had as soon as I let go of it,_ Hyunjin’s mom had asked of her. She had held it ever since, and would continue to. No child should’ve seen all that Hyunjin had seen. If only Heejin had followed her inkling earlier, if only she had followed Hyunjin earlier. Human life was so short and cut even shorter by evil Yves. To lose one through unnatural causes was enough. It wasn’t fair for a child to have to go through it at all, let alone twice. Her mother had wanted her daughter to remember her for her youthfulness not her decay, and so she had sent her away. Though how could a mollycoddled daughter so dependent and so loved be without her mother? She had rushed to her only to be told through the nose of their dog and the sixth sense of their cat that it was too late.

 

Heejin wouldn’t let there be more regrets. She buried herself in the crook of Hyunjin’s neck, finding it to be the opportune height for her to plop her head there and stay. That was, had she not been pushed off brashly at the sound of an opening door. One could say it looked like a minor scuffle from an unknowing third person perspective and those people were Haseul and Vivi coming home after picking up Yeojin from her cram academy. “You two must not be on good terms,” Haseul joked.

 

A worked up Heejin had to be pulled back by Hyunjin. “Puppy, she’s just teasing,” she calmed her down by patting her head.

 

Yeojin shivered. “Petition to start a move out fund for them?”

 

“Accepted,” Vivi shook her on it.

 

***

 

Kim Lip’s namesake, whether Haseul intended it or not, was an eccentric poet renowned during the Joseon dynasty for his personality as much as his poetry. A crestfallen wanderer fallen into despair with the crescent moon as his backdrop, he had written this:

 

_The poet passes the waterside arbour_

_And slumps in drunken sleep under a pinetree_

_The moon moves, the mountain shadows shift_

_The merchants return home with their gains_

 

It was an autobiographical work, lamenting his woes over accidentally attacking the memory of his predecessor. Ashamed, he relegated himself to an outcasted life. Though his son would track him down, he would slip away. Was he not Kim Lip? It gave her a headache humans could never quite grasp. It pained her so, this silly thing called ‘Naver searching yourself’. So this was her, she tried accepting her fate and rubbed her aching temples in consultation. She had been right to marvel at the curiosity that was human intellect. In their ignorance, myths, and glorifications, they inadvertently unraveled more than they’d ever know.

 

 _Stay with me here on earth a bit longer. Have some fun for once. Forget your worries,_ Jinsoul had offered her an easy way out of her predicament. She had taken this obvious course instead of the meandering one she had used to love traversing with first Haseul then Yeojin. Her daughter, their daughter. She had never said the words aloud, afraid to manifest this secret existence, this concealed fact. She didn’t hate her for it. She couldn’t hate the mother of her child. Why would she have kept Yeojin if she didn’t have lingering feelings for her? So what was it exactly that Kim Lip had done wrong? What had made Haseul run from her, and hide this of all things from her?

 

Dressed in a white and blue school uniform indicative of the mission at hand, Jinsoul gave her temporary solace again, putting on a future bass track, firing up their car speakers with accelerating tempo like a heart pulsating in excitement. Jinsoul like her spirit animal was a fighting spirit. The blue betta, also known as Siamese Fighting Fish, was resilient, bold, dazzling. It was this that had the newly formed Jungeun walking towards her in the buff. She had asked her then what no mortal or immortal had ever before. _“How’d you get that scar between your eyebrows?”_ had been her first question, her first words in this new existence.

 

Jinsoul, who had never talked about it before, never wanting anyone to notice it before, gave this most beautiful of newborn creatures her honest reply, _“I fell. I fell a long, long, long, long way until I finally got back up and came back here.”_ There they had stood, two girls with their unique and distinct powers and personalities, without past nor pretend. It was a song that had no echo, and Kim Lip would have to remind Jinsoul of this. She was done. Done with their lack of true talk, their concealments for their own benefits rather than each others'. The answers she couldn’t seek from Haseul, she would ask of Jinsoul instead.

 

Turning down the music, Kim Lip addressed the odd fish in the room. “Don’t you want to know what happened to me while you were gone? Or...or do you already know, but don’t care? What really happened Jinsoul? Why were you in the basement?” she asked in her dulcet voice, evoking truth untold.

 

The car was stopped mid-desert road with not a soul in sight. Not even Jinsoul, for her soul had left her. In a space for just her and Kim Lip, with their breath so close like they were filling the hushed gaps, she wondered why she had to come for her right now. The centuries old veil was slowly coming off and a new sensation was blooming, pricklier than the combination of the flowers known through the eons combined. Kim Lip’s proding lead had awakened her to the urgency of the matter, the thin line of dialogue crossing the boundary on the road, filling her up. So this was the new Kim Lip, fully-fledged for flight with or without her.

 

“I didn’t know anything. I was just completing my tasks,” she tried to justify her wrongdoings. Her voice trembled with the ocean inside her. She had so wanted to have her, to be with her for that something new rising further in her heart that she could only identify as Kim Lip. Now, she might just lose her. It was a mystery that seemed like she’d only discovered for the first time, killing her softly, just taking her slowly. Every time she breathed with her human lungs, taking in sharp breathes merging into pain, she sunk in further into her seat of despair. Would Kim Lip come into her mind already and let her out? She didn’t want to have to enunciate every sin, to admit to her hand in the handling of the corrupted world, the slain world, halved so _she_ could be full.  

 

The provalivities of love, distorted but ever apparent, had Kim Lip granting Jinsoul’s unspoken wish. She looked into her mind and saw the soul inside her. Saw through her eyes was if she was born again with her. She filled her up like cherry blue and sought to wash out her memories of burgundy that she simply could not. She saw her hurt time and time again at the hands of the immortal and understood it all. Understood what Jinsoul had kept from her to keep her with her, and why she had desperately done so. She vowed then and there one thing: after this mission, she would kill Yves, and serve her poetic justice.

 

***

 

Prone to oversleeping, Yeojin was met first thing in the morning by boisterous commands that had her covering her ears. “You malingering brat! Get up, get up!” her guardian patted her butt, throwing her covers aside.

 

“Okay, okay!” the typical high schooler pretended to wake up, then slunked down again when she thought Haseul had left for good. Cons of having a full-time stay at home writer in the family was that they were also a constant nagging presence. Yeojin cried out again when her precious blanket was yet again stolen from her.

 

“Maybe if you weren’t so obdurate every morning, I wouldn’t have to berate you constantly,” she slipped in more uncommon words in her scolding, hoping Yeojin would retain something. For a girl who loved stories, she sure didn't like writing or any language subject matter for that fact.

 

“You don’t have to yell at me first thing in the morning. I can’t understand you anyways,” she grumbled, tossing her hair about in frustration.

 

“And you never will if you don’t go to school,” Haseul made her last point before slipping away, smug that she had roused her at last.

 

Cold feet seeking the refuge of her fuzzy slippers, Yeojin hurdled her way into the tiny bathroom. Her home and all it contained was more lilliputian than she last recalled, littler than she herself had once been. But at the age of adolescence, all liked to think they were some big entity in the cosmos only to be bitter over just how small they really were still.  

 

She wasn’t curious about the world outside the window so much nowadays confined to the brick and mortar school and the banal of human life.  The kid who’d always balanced pebbles on the back of her hand alone, waiting until she was the last one at school when Haseul would come running from her then part-time job to pick her up - Yeojin would say she had fared well. If she were to share a bit of laughter with each of us, she’d talk of children sticking fingers into outlets. Instead of thinking about how they’d glow, we’d glow in worry instead over her strange humor. How come she was thinking of destruction?

 

Pre-robotic Vivi’s blouse cut through by the likes of a utility knife, deep, could not match the deep harrowing hollowness Yeojin sometimes felt. She had walked barefoot, been punctured with thumb tacks in every step until she encountered Kim Lip. Now seeing her nearly adult self staring back at her, she feared she suffered from the worst case of prosopagnosia. It was hard to go back to something that wasn’t hers to go back to. Brushing her hair behind her ears, she smoothly adorned herself as Haseul used to do for her. _Used to._ How unfitting it was to be a dead kid one day and an alive teen the next. Nevertheless, at the sound of the whistle, her sister’s beckoning, she diligently returned to her post. Letting go of her childhood self who would laugh at a missed kick, clenching her buttocks with unceasing laughter. She was merely quick to heat up, quick to cool down. Still Haseul’s child, obedient one moment and naughty the next.  

 

In all her strange imaginative flair however, she would have never been able to guess the visitor on their doorstep. Her savior returned more welcomed than the next coming of Yves. “You’re really back! And I was starting to think I had just imagined you since you just kinda vanished on me and no one here has even mentioned anything about you! Where have you been?! Did you see anything cool while you were away?” she threw a million and one questions at Kim Lip at once, hugging her tighter than she’d hug Haseul when she wanted some snack or a bit of leniency from her. Behind her stood a withdrawn Haseul, hand on her arm, stunned now as she had been before.

 

Kim Lip wanted to answer all her questions, to give her the biggest reassurance. She wasn’t fond of hugs, shriveling away from Jinsoul even. Though this affection from her child she’d allow. “Yeah, I’m back. You didn’t just imagine me. I’m real, all of it was real. I’ve been here and there trying to find my way back here,” she spoke to them both, looking at Haseul as she did so. “I-I’ve seen things you can only imagine.”

 

“Oh please,” Yeojin let go of her to assert her newfound maturity, something she was glad to have for a change. “I’ve watched rated things before.”

 

“W-what?! No, that’s not what I-I-” Kim Lip stammered, looking pleadingly for Haseul to handle this situation for her. “What would your mom say?” she blurted out without thought.

 

Yeojin backed away from her. “I don’t have a mom. My mom died when I was born.” It was a single sentence that sentenced Kim Lip and Haseul both to a misery only condemned mothers knew. Worse than any abhorring disdain a school teacher could receive from their former favorite pupil. Aberration of a sort sorer than salted wounds. It was hurt never to be described. Rather felt deep in the gut being sliced open until it bled into the other organs, creating an indecipherable unseeable mess.

 

How startling the most precocious of children could be, unwittingly cruel beyond their age. To think that once Haseul had ran with her until she was out of breath. She couldn’t see the end in the yesteryears that had passed in a place so far away. But with this child, the day shined more than the striking sun. Whenever her feet touched the ground each morning, she’d make her day with little Yeojin, her hidden gift. Whenever her feet touched the mattress at last late, late at night, if she was by Yeojin, she was happy. Her eyes would stop on her, their love the best precious hidden song in the deepest part of her heart. Her melody twinkling more and more each day with starry eyes. Eyes too like Kim Lip to ignore.

 

“She’s yours,” Haseul admitted once they had sent Yeojin off to the bus.

 

She had nearly forgotten how mellifluous her voice could be, melodic in song and sorrow where it was strained in struggle and madness. But it was Kim Lip who had the right to be mad. She kept their distance, much on her mind still to keep them apart. “She’s all yours. She’s never been mine. You never gave me the chance.”

 

Love was an incommodious commodity too common and too extensively corruptible. “I’m sorry, but-” how could she go on? No one could understand the possible future unless they could see them for themselves. And no one could see them except Haseul. What could she possibly say to excuse her seemingly senseless crime?

 

The coexistence of sweetness and cruelness in first love, they had both known it firsthand. One shouldn’t wait passively for it to come nor for it to leave. She had to admit it. Admit that she had missed her all along more than she had ever let on. So again, why then did she leave? “But?” Kim Lip had to ask, willing to hear anything. Hoping that whatever reason it was, it would make perfect sense. She needed this. Her limpidity that she would go limp for. Her plain words so dressed with emotion and thought, they were never truly plain.

 

“I know you won’t believe me,” Haseul began, feeling her stuttering wanting to take over. She wouldn’t let it, giving all she had in her rapid furry of words to say, “if I had stayed, if you had known, something terrible would have happened. You would’ve died. We might all have. We’re not supposed to be together.”

 

It amazed Kim Lip. It did wonders Haseul could’ve never foreseen in all her visions. It was why she was here. “I know,” she let on, at last giving up her guard to take a step closer to Haseul whose hand still gripped on the front door knob like to let go would be to shut the door forever. It was why Kim Lip had to let her know, “But we need to be together. All of us.” She willed her to let down her strained hand to meet hers. “I need you.”

 

***

 

Who flies through the trees the way fruit bats do with the most consummate ease? Choerry was a child not of consummation but of adaptation and adoption. She fluttered her fluttering wings here and there until at last landing by the school window, taking on human form to call Yeojin out for more than just fun. It had been quite a while since she last flew until she came to where the figs grew in abundance, where she would feast until she could feast no more. In all this time none had recognized her save two: one her savior and the other her strange little friend. Though she wasn’t so little anymore. It was astonishing that they were almost the same height now, almost the same earthly age too, maybe.

 

 

Choerry hadn't aged a day since her first mission. Yeojin had aged so many. Ageless Choerry though, still had a birthday in time with the full moon, and leave it to the time of lunar events for strange things to occur. From plies of ash to a bat to the undead, Choerry really was a wonder amidst the cut silver blue grass. It wasn’t fun, her vigilant runs to look back on time with sadness. Everything and everyone changed so quick with the exception of the two humans that defied time and logic that she had come to known. Having been able to place a cat sticker on the map where she found Hyunjin, she now had her eyes on the frog sticker on her finger.

 

“How did you not age at all?” Yeojin patted her back, chummy as ever for her summer time friend. A mysterious older girl who only came back and hung for the hot weather fun.

 

“How’d you come back from the dead?” Choerry asked back.

 

“Okay, true,” she laughed at their shared inability to explain the unexplainable. They hung out like this after school the rest of the day. Bats each had a jagged silken sleeve shielding them from moonlit rafters bright as polished weapons. Choerry and Yeojin had the idyllic pools and representative adorable animal floaties to keep them cool in the heat. Others would say this storyless stranger was mysterious as much as the color purple, a cherry blossom about to bloom, casting a love spell on the unaware. Yeojin would say she was just another girl, hating the taste of cherries forced on her - she was, after all, the only person outside of Eden to own her own fruit. She wanted to laze about listening to some funky pop dance tune in the open air away from all others and all responsibilities. This she had in common with Yeojin and all they really needed to know or had cared to know about each other.

 

When the song playing broke beats to create its own sense of style in finesse, Choerry too broke her disguise. It was time Yeojin knew. Summers of childhood mirth could only last so long. “Hey, remember how you were always complimenting my little hand mirrors asking where I got them?”

 

Yeojin lowered her shades as if that would somehow help her hear better over the pool’s subtle waves. “Yeah, and I still want one. But you never told me!”

 

“Would you come to the mirror field with me one day then?” She continued on explaining before Yeojin could press her with more questions. “It’s just next to the forest. Totally safe and I can take you back home any time, I promise.”

 

Never taking caution, a frog more eager to leap to its demise than a drop of rain to the ground, Yeojin fought her urge. “Oh damn, I totally would but Haseul unnie said next time I follow a wild animal-”

 

Choerry raised objection. “I’m not some animal. I’m your friend.”

 

Yeojin wavered, yet the image of Haseul scolding her in her head kept her somewhat grounded from Choerry’s soaring heights. “Okay, but you’re gonna need a better reason than that.”

 

“You can trust me, Choerry smiled a sunshine all-knowing smile. “I’m your sister.”

 

***

 

**_Random Short Side Story 4:_ **

 

“Care to stop for a couple’s telepathy game? There’s a prize of an animal plushie if you answer three out of five questions the same,” the amusement park game man from nowhere tried to entice them.

 

“Nice try but-” Chaewon began.

 

“We’re not a couple,” Hyejoo foiled his advertisement.

 

“Oh, I was going to say we don’t have money,” Chaewon mumbled in her small voice.

 

Having heard her but pretending not to, Hyejoo elaborated, “We’re soulmates, so be prepared to lose!” She handed him a bill to play and held Chaewon’s hand in her own. “We got this, unnie. Just always pick the first option,” she whispered to her.

 

“Nice try but,” the overhearding conman repeated their words back to them, “it’s open-ended questions and you both have to answer right away without hesitation.”

 

Hyejoo’s reaction was quicker than her sunken face of disapproval. “Can I get my money back then? We don’t want to play anymore.” The only thing faster than her snatch at her money was the man’s hands, pocketing the cash.

 

“Let’s just give it a try,” Chaewon convinced her.

 

“Ugh, fine.”

 

The man smiled and promptly began his relationship-wrecking game. “What’s your ideal date?”

 

“A gaming night at home!” Hyejoo said in the same breath that Chaewon said “An amusement park date,” much to her embarrassment.

 

“No luck,” the man laughed cynically. “Only four more chances and you have to get at least three out of the remaining!”

 

“Okay, we got this,” Chaewon gave Hyejoo who liked having her hand held a little squeeze.

 

“Name a color!”

 

“Lavender!” “Black!” they answered with each other’s favorite colors.

 

“Last chance! Favorite flower?”

 

“Roses!” they high-fived at this.

 

“Grr, favorite TV show couple?”

 

“Bubbline!” they said followed by a little “Assa!” from Gowon and a quiet laugh from Hyejoo.

 

“Okay, last one!” The now perspiring man racked his brain for a hard question for couples until he found the perfect one: “The biggest obstacle in your relationship?”

 

They hesitated for a quarter of a second and in that time, their obstacle came crashing in on them. An enraged Sooyoung came to drag her daughter home, followed closely behind by her scuddling wife struggling to keep her calm. “Olivia Hyejoo, what are you doing with that spoiled brat from across the street? I told you to stay away from her! Don’t you know that her mom-”

 

“Mom, you said you could handle her!” Hyejoo resisted being tugged away.

 

Jiwoo laughed awkwardly, “Sorry kid, but mommy Sooyoung said she wouldn’t let me anywhere near her and would give me the silent treatment if I didn’t let her know where you went.”

 

“Didn’t your mother-”

 

“What?! Didn’t her mother what?” It was Chaewon’s blonde mom this time, coming in fierce.

 

“Psht, wanna go chill while they fight it out?” Chaewon’s cooler mom, one that had been friends with Jiwoo before the four parents had became a love square mess that didn’t end even after they had kids, suggested.

 

The four nodded in unison and left Sooyoung and Jinsoul to their own devices, with tensions higher than two professional competing bowling teams.

 

 

* * *

**Hello again! It will be over two weeks before I can update again bc of a personal vacation so please do enjoy this and lmk what you think~ There’s still so much to unravel and if things aren’t clear yet, it’s meant to be that way so far for the most part... I hope you big Loonaverse theory fans enjoyed all the different bits of lore and references I put in as usual ^^**

  
**_Some events in the next chapter:_ **more past comes to light, and more. What would you all like to see though? Who or which pairings should I talk about more?


	8. Land Before Time

**Chapter 8**   _in which Choerry tempts Yeojin with knowledge, Chaewon is as lonely as Olivia even with her new friends who are too busy with their own issues, Chuu and Jinsoul both think about the same person but also not, LipSeul spend some time together again at last_

* * *

 

 

“Yeah, I know,” Yeojin replied back to Choerry casually. 

 

“You know?” she raised her sunglasses questioning.

 

Yeojin was so sure of her own words, Choerry’s wondering didn’t phase her. “Yeah, you’re like an actual sister to me,” she smiled and dipped her toes into the deeper end of the pool. It was a height she couldn’t fully stand in, and though she wasn’t a great swimmer, having Choerry by her side was reassuring.

 

Summer’s suffocating heat taking Choerry’s eternal exuberance as its long-awaited victim, she looked on at her younger friend with sympathy only she knew. The things of which Yeojin did not know boiled like a latent illness waiting to erupt. There was no opprobrium in the truth, so why did _they_ have to keep such things from her? Yves herself was only a few years older when she recreated the world in her image. Hyejoo was even younger when they initiated her into Eden. Thinking of such thoughts made the latter grow in her, her heart becoming so hot like it had swallowed the sun. Her thoughts were getting ahead of themselves. She was worried she could no longer keep it all in, all under control.

 

“Hey, are you okay? Do you want to get out of the water?” Yeojin asked her with concern, nudging at her floatie.

 

No, she didn’t want to get out of the water. But she did want to get out this situation. Nothing save the truth could bridge them together, connecting the mirrors as one to reflect the true images of them all. “You know,” she changed the subject, assuring Yeojin she was fine with the wave of a hand, “I’m pretty sure I know your power.”

 

There was laughter at this. “What power besides being able to talk to animals?” Yeojin laughed off, reminding Choerry of their former senseless talks of youth. They talked in their own conlang, one of roaches, bats, and frogs and more beloved animals galore that adults and celestials alike would scratch their head over.

 

It gave Choerry a headache now to have to break it to Yeojin there was so much more to her than fantastic tales of fantstatic beasts and where to find them. The stray thought hit her. She wondered if back in the place they’d both come to know if Olivia was as restless as she was, missing her as much as she was, wanting everyone to just be honest with each other just as she does. If life was school, then this mission was her biggest homework. As much as she and Olivia both detested studying, this was a task she had to ace. The unsolved puzzle from A to Z to be solved, an untouched bubble to be popped like an uncatchable dream of wanting to be held by someone far off, a dream different from her usual dreams. She needed to find all of her and all of them. And it started here, far from home with the youngest of them all before she could make it back to the place where the loneliest of them all was waiting. “Actually, didn’t you ever wonder why you were able to wonder into the world beyond and find your way out?” she piqued Yeojin’s interest as she knew she would. “What if I told you that you were the child of two worlds?”

 

Eyes wide, Yeojin had to admit that Choerry got her. She was getting curious. The question marks around her were getting bigger. Where would she start to investigate? The Möbius strip of existence was like a tangled thread, it couldn’t get better. But could it get worse? In her newfound maturity, she harbored the yearning for her lost youth. In her desire to be an adult, she wanted just as much to be a kid. She missed the days of old. She missed Choerry’s yammering of a self-composed song along with her self-choreographed dance. Yeojin still vividly recalled how she stood nearby waiting to pilfer her routine to show off to her new friends. No offense taken. There was a comity that had they known their respective fates would seem like comedy. That was just it. Ignorance was the cruelest of comedies save for the biggest joke of them all - the truth. “What do you mean?” she began to question her identity and the reasoning behind her abilities, already afraid of the answer.

 

***

 

A princess without a kingdom, an aristocrat proud and mighty but all alone, Chaewon sat on her sad throne. No, it wasn’t a proper gilded throne but one of another sort. She gamed away on the toilet, locking herself in the restroom for hours on end where no one would check up for her nor ask for her company. How cruel her new friends where, she thought to herself as she fed her farm animals in her handheld game. At least she had these barnyard companions that wouldn’t leave her by her lonesome. So this was what it was like to be alone in a group of friends. She hadn’t felt this in a while.

 

Quite interestingly though to Chaewon’s personal dismay, she wasn’t sure how she felt besides the undertones of sadness she attempted to ward off with her solo gaming. But even gaming could be a fun social act and what was a gamer doing alone in experiences meant for multiplayer fun. Where was her playmate? Heck, she didn’t mind Jiwoo’s liveliness nor Heejin’s dorky wannabe playboy-ness nor Jinsoul and Kim Lip’s strange dynamic. She missed the noise, the mess, the thing Jiwoo called “friends until the end.”

 

It had only been a single day without hearing or seeing Jiwoo and already something felt adrift. It was a drifting that had the seemingly most independent of folks admitting they wanted a shipmate. The unanchored Chaewon needed checking in on. She sighed, rolling up a ball of toilet paper in her hand and squeezing it. Suddening calling to mind how an unidentified hand used to squish and squeeze her malleable cheeks as she sat in her arms watching her game, she tossed the unused paper in the waste bin. It was a waste, but so where these mirages of memories that weren’t memories she could truly fully recall. Maybe she didn’t want the truth just yet, just a distraction from it. And what was a better diversion than a company of mismatching rascals.

 

Just the other day, like all the days before it on her short stay here, she had quite the interesting banter with Jiwoo. Her wild friend had been literally leaping off the walls, hopping across the rain-downed sidewalk without caution. “Are you like high-high right now or something?” Chaewon ran after her, struggling to keep their shared umbrella over Jiwoo’s erratic bouncing head. 

 

“No, I’m just thinking about Jinsoul and Kim Lip,” Jiwoo turned back to her all smiles. “Don’t you think there’s something to be said there? The way they’re supposedly actually dating but still fake disgust at each other or how they only hold hands when they think we aren’t looking then toss each other’s hand when they realize we are…” she ranted on and on. “Like wow, definition of enemies to lovers trope! Wouldn’t it be nice to find someone who love-hated you like that?”

 

What a talker she was. Chaewon couldn’t quite grasp Jiwoo’s thundering waterfall of words especially among the crushing thunderstorm brewing. Though she did catch one thing. “I have no idea what you’re saying, but don’t you think you’re projecting a bit?” she muttered before her mind wandered elsewhere.

 

Perhaps rightfully accused, Jiwoo laughed maniacally, maliciously to an extent. “No, but why project when you can astroproject?” she caught absentminded Chaewon in the act, leaping from the sidewalk ledge where she had been fake tightrope walking and directly into Chaewon’s space, testing her attentiveness and reflexes. In response, Chaewon’s soul leapt out of her as she scrambled to catch the messy Jiwoo.

 

“See what I mean?” Jiwoo smiled at the jolted Chaewon acting like she had done no wrong. No, rather not even conscious of how bizarre she was.Chaewon flushed at tad, pushing Jiwoo to stand on her own two feet. “Oh, I never asked, Chaewon. What’s your ideal type?”

 

“I-” Chaewon was caught off guard again, though her mental blank would very soon pass. “I don’t know. Someone who likes to do things because they think it would annoy me, but it doesn’t? Someone who’d wrestle me down and not let me win as much as I want to, but at the same time would recall everything I say casually in passing. A friend who’s a soulmate?”

 

“Damn, that’s oddly specific,” Jiwoo stared at her quizzically.

 

Having overshared, Chaewon reddened. She fought her embarrassment and panic by directing the attention back on the ever talkative Jiwoo. “What about you?” 

 

A rain soaked Jiwoo shrugged, taking the umbrella from Chaewon as she should have done long ago. You couldn’t expect a pampered shorty to know how to handle an umbrella nevermind hold it over herself and someone taller than her. “I kind of like the idea of someone who could wrestle you down too. But like, someone who’d do that to anyone that threatens to hurt you. Someone jealous when it’s actually you who’s even more jealous. Someone who could have dozens of girls falling over them simultaneously but still chooses you, but knows this and actually says it to you. Someone who’s a girl crush but someone who’s also so soft that grannies would also instantly love them.”

 

“Don’t you think yours is even more oddly specific than mine?” Chaewon challenged.

 

Jiwoo forced a laugh at this. “I know, right? What am I thinking?” What was she thinking? Her newly bought camera in her bag weighed on her then. She was just another novice wannabe photographer with a lense too big to fit in her hands. Her photos were grainy and lacking focus as though the cometary dust  of the trails of life had abraded her camera, degrading whatever she still managed to capture in this state. “You know what? Screw ideal types. They’re just too good to be true and are always less perfect than we make them out to be,” Jiwoo declared. “Just go with whatever hits your assa.”

 

It was Chaewon who smiled now. The last of these statements was something she could definitely agree with. “Yeah!” She hit some abiding core memory in her that bafflingly couldn’t be retrieved to the forefront at the moment. She spoke through another’s voice saying, “Everyone is a monster to someone.” Instinctively, she daintily dusted off Jiwoo’s hand that briefly held hers, just briefly.

 

 _You didn’t brush HER off,_ another phantom voice of the past that sounded an awful lot like Jiwoo’s but was not Jiwoo’s came back to her. What was this resurgence of memories that were novel rather than reminiscent?

 

 _Because she needed to be held,_ a Gowon who knew a Hyejoo who liked holding the hands of another even if it was just a single finger had answered back. She alone didn’t mind her gibes, her attempts to cope through playfully hurting another. Hyejoo was more similar to them all then she herself would ever realize. It was what made her the best of them all, in Gowon’s highly biased mind. But what did Chaewon know of this? For all she knew, maybe she was just astroprojecting, traveling to a different nonexistent dimension in her mind’s eye.

 

***

 

Ah, yes, the rainstorms of humanity. A cursed weather condition humanity would rather attribute to a single person’s bad luck rather than their own self-inflicted climate disaster. It was in this disastrous rainfall that Yves made her mad dash back to Eden. In her blinding rage over Chuu’s actions, she still heard her voice ringing through her ears more piercing than the thunder that crashed against her, threatening to burn her. Maybe it was what she needed. A good burn. _You know, the difference between the in-between and Eden is that the in-between gives you anything you wish for, whereas Eden has already given it to you long before you realize how much you’d need it,_ Chuu had once repeated her words back to her very early on. So early on that it was time before the fall of men, before the rise of Vivi, and before the death of Hyejoo and rebirth of Olivia. _That’s why we found her, don’t you think? She’s the best of both of us._

 

Chuu was as right as she was wrong. Yves didn’t love and hate Hyejoo so because she was like them. She needed her because she reminded her of _her_ . A _her_ before Chuu, before Yves, before all time. The true mother of all creation who Yves had stripped of everything in her admiration of her. What made _her_ so pulchritudinous to all who beheld her? Was it wide eyes clear where Hyejoo’s were muddled, lips dainty where Chuu’s were poignant, silliness where Gowon was proper, motions erratic where Vivi’s were composed? She couldn’t depict her because it wasn’t Jinsoul that she knew, but an older her. A pre-evolution predecessor, the bird that devolved into the wingless fish. A de-winging just for her.

 

Before books, there were _her_ words. Her eyes coruscated as she spoke to not Yves but Sooyoung of the world down under, the world a tree away and a forest not yet in existence apart. It made her wingless counterpart who never left the safety of the gardens feel coarse and irradiated. Gravel to her marble, exposed to her own self-perceived radiation. Compared to the first of storytellers, the starter of all tales, Yves was just a fictioneer. A champion of the most mediocre and overtold tales. If Yves was honest with herself, reading books was becoming superannuated, no longer moving through shelves nor able to move minds the way they once had. Did this mark this once revolutionary as now a member of the old guard? She was the last bastion of faith in a land before time upholding principles no one could remember nor know mind her. Perhaps in all her prolix prose her supreme divinity notwithstanding, she was just another human, struggling with simple words and thoughts she couldn’t put simply.

 

She had even forgotten her original name somehow. The lethologica framing itself as amnesia for the woman who would not admit she had conned off another’s wings. Wings that once had let the most beautiful of birds fly, taken by her to mount on her back as bland white wings of a nameless species. The birth of Yves in truth wasn’t a Renaissance painting with divinity and beauty for all to behold. It was a darker tale mirroring her own treatment of Hyejoo. Her detransformation of her. She admitted to herself then that she was more evil than all her companions combined could ever be. She only found disdain for them when she saw parts of her past in them. And so it was that Yves, the most powerful of all beings, was the weakest against herself. A mere girl who hated herself for not being able to fully remember and punished people by having the same fate befall them. What could all the writings and  books in the world never tell her? The answer was a story as old as time. A story of a beauty and a beast. A beauty and a beat that Yves would heard but could not replicate. The story of her own past that only the oldest being in the universe could tell.

 

***

 

The night deepening, Jinsoul dashed to make the last train. The first step in her mission had her alone though not truly so. She still had this bit of music, did she not? She awaited the lulling of the melodic opusculum in her ears as much as Yves sought comfort in literary works. Jinsoul wondered who was the piano virtuoso she heard through her headphones, such irreplicable music it was irrefutable divine. Jinsoul could be taken as simple and light-spirited but slipshod she was not. Of course she remembered. More clearly than Yves herself. 

 

Her last day in class, the professor had spoken in parable telling the not widely known tale of the curious woman who de-winged a toy bird to see how it flew. She could only regret after that she had wrecked it. Her inconsolable grieve the price of her curiosity. While others scribbled notes away trying to decipher the tale, Jinsoul had found herself teary-eyed. So humans had an inkling of the true story of how Yves came to be after all. It was a remnant of the past retold as a universal flood tale to be reinterpreted differently by every culture. But far from the books and their morals, did any of them ever truly learn the moral here?

 

Now on her way to find out, after having told this archaic bit of history to Kim Lip and Kim Lip alone, Jinsoul turned up the volume on her outdated cassette player. She sat there alone on the train with no company except the music in her ears. Had anyone seen Jinsoul with that cassette player, they would say It was just nostalgia. A retro item. No, it was perfectly harmless looking baleful blasphemy, Jinsoul would correct them. Here in these tapes were memories more bountiful than those bestowed upon the Giver, Father Time, the Three-Eyed Raven and all their kind combined. It was all of time itself. It was a melodic wordless intro that played through her contrasting latest state of the art earphones. The music rippled within her, making her recall that time, that face. Then, there was silence in one ear. Who was it who took one earphone out? She didn’t recognize her own hand until she realized that it was acting as another’s. 

 

“Tell me everything!” she could ask of her so endearingly, eyes of a newborn chick waiting to be filled. She guttled her every word, every story of the humanly world down under, taking them as her meals - all seven courses. How could she ever be full when she was always empty, needing someone to fill her up? The former Jinsoul was a polymath long before Yves would claim to be one. Her riveting ways could captivate one for days.

 

“I want to go down one day. I want to see these humans you made that you always speak so fondly of,” Sooyoung, the first of her creations who she kept to herself alone up there spoke to her with a blend of envy and curiosity so genuine and potent there would be no match for it even now as we speak.

 

The predecessor of Jinsoul had laughed at her warmly. “Do you think you could handle?” she asked the underexposed girl, the girl who knew of no one except her, of no place except this garden. It was the garden of the Kingfisher, an aqua blue aquatic bird who dove for fish by gliding through the air. An angel who swooped down among the sea of humanity. A shy bird with a huge footstep on humanity. A bird some once called an omen while others branded as sacred. One’s fact was another’s fiction, some would say. Though both were right. What was saddest was that regardless of her intent for humanity and for Sooyoung, she along with her species would soon be threatened by extinction.

 

Sooyoung bit her lip. “Why do you put up with humans who hurt you? You told me yourself that I should be careful of men. If it were up to me, I’d terminate them all and make a better world where everyone was like us. Just us girls!” Her bold statement came off as a child’s wishful thinking, with little to indicate precisely how vicious an empowered goddess could one day be. 

 

The patient and wise mother of the Möbius universe corrected her. “It’s not just men who hurt others. Be careful of women too. Look how malicious you are,” she teased, waiting for Sooyoung to stick out her tongue before wrapping her in her embrace. She let her go when she felt a protrusion in her pocket. “What’s this?” 

 

“The instrument you brought back last time,” a more honest than guilt stricken Sooyoung admitted right away. “I took it out of your bag and kept it. I’m sorry,” she frowned but didn’t keep her head low. “It’s just, I’ve never heard anything like this music.”

 

“You know you’re not supposed to keep anything from the Earthly world here for too long,” she chastised her, threatening to snatch away her toy, humanity's first string instrument. 

 

And just who was this divine creator to set down these nonsensical rules? Well, she was Sooyoung’s everything for one, but that would change. Sooyoung, more disobedient than she had ever been kept the instrument a tad out of her reach. “Would you give me one of your wings in exchange?” she asked of her this task far from a bagatelle as a light piece of music nearby waffed its way into both their ears. Which was more melodic: Sooyoung’s soft voice asking her to surrender half her world to her or the music of death only those who gave it could hear?

 

“You could lose yourself. You could forget yourself and me alike if you take on one of my wings,” she cautioned her, drawing her face closer to her own. “Do you still want it?”

 

Sooyoung met her lips, taking not only the other’s breath away but also her resolution to keep her safe and hers alone. “Yes,” was her single answer that would change the known universe. 

 

Befitting of this superimposition of love and death, out of the creator’s sorrow would eventually spring a forest as enrapturing as it was unending. A forrest encroaching on the garden’s steps where they had taken their last steps as an inseparable pair. But a pair no more. A forest was a dream to be lost in just as it was a reality to wake up in. And this was where she could find Kim Lip long, long, _long_ after she had surrendered both her wings. Given up her everything even her name to the girl who would become Yves. For there would have never been an Yves if there was first no forgotten Ahdem. And Ahdem in her infinite wisdom could have never guessed she had been shielding the world from Yves, not the other way around.

 

***

 

One would never know that it was one of the hottest days of summer in all of Asia given the mild rain outside. Kim Lip had often teased Haseul saying it was Haseul’s curse whenever inopportune weather chanced itself by appearing just as Haseul set her mind to do something new or adventurous in the forest. Today was like those times back then, and the Korean comfort food of boiled chicken with it’s own broth tasted as delectable now as it did then. Though one thing was different. 

 

“It’s not bad,” Kim Lip complimented the chef. “Different from when you used to wish for already fully cooked chicken, but not bad.” She had changed, become mature beyond her age.  

 

Haseul grinned a proud grin. “Yeah, I can’t exactly make things appear out of thin air here, can I? Besides, I have children to feed now. I have a daughter now.” Her smile took on another meaning. “ _We_ have a daughter now.” She finished washing the last of the dishes and laid down with her reunited love in the same couch where she often laid with Vivi. How grateful was she for once that Vivi was away picking up Yeojin, sparing her this moment along with Kim Lip. What as sinner she was. She truly had changed, but so had Kim Lip who did little more than nod at her words, her mind on something else. Someone else perhaps. “Tell me everything,” Haseul asked of her, finding her arms to be not hers and hers only as she nested herself in her embrace, knowing she had been with another. “Tell me about her.”

 

“Do you really want to know?” the uncertain Kim Lip held back. Wasn’t it enough for them to hold each other like this now before the world’s next momentous change? The next big chapter in their shared tale.

 

“Yes,” was Haseul’s steadfast answer not out of curiosity but out of affection. She had to know what she was up against. Who exactly was this other woman that Kim Lip loved so.

 

And so began Kim Lip’s cosmic tale of time and existence, one that was retold for the first time to human ears. For a short time, in the beginning, there was Ahdem and Yves. But since they ate of each other’s fruits, humanity had never been able to refrain from any of the folly of which divine and creation akin were capable. There was no military putsch in the creation of the current world. Women did not prefer to fight with arms, rather with cunning. And so, the world was rewritten one smooth word at at time. It was how Yves prefered it to be.

 

Some would say that marriage was purgatory with its mediocrity, regrets, and bordoms. But as the original couple could attest, time is the only true purgatory. Perhaps they had been stuck in between too long dreaming of earth rather than enjoying all there was in Eden. Those without wings would do all they could to obtain them, and those who have them could only lose them. Jinsoul’s stoic beauty was art on the tips of her feathered wings, ready to be passed on flying to others with or without purpose depending on one’s interpretation. The single-winged swan, the newly formed one-winged Yves could not easily take flight. It could only ask for more from it’s Giving Tree. 

 

She didn’t know such a thing as a kerfuffle. No cornering nor scuffles even as she surrendered her wings. Not until she found conflict in her, and within her. One would think conversations would be difficult between them given they had nobody but themselves to talk about. But there were. At least at first. There were missing presences which made conversation paradoxically all the more inaccessible. The more she gave to Yves, the less they spoke. The more Yves became her and she became Sooyoung, the less they knew each other.

 

It was all about Yves, it had always been. A new Eden Yves made. The world was first constructed by Ahdem but now was the time of a new eve, the time of Yves. Yves was her own clue, she wasn’t clueless. Twenty-four hours wouldn’t be enough for her. She wanted more and yet again Ahdem relented. Ahdem wasn’t done giving even after the shedding of her wings one after the other to crown Yves the new mother of a humanity that she’d adopt. She wasn’t always a fish, she was a mermaid first with scales more radiant than three different colored moons combined. But with one request from Yves asking for an easier way to traverse the world, she shed her scales one by one. They would lay there like mirrors dotting the landscape, taking Yves anywhere and everywhere far from her. It was a spotted lake of mirrors mirroring the sacred one on Earth only more ethereal than humans could contrive.

 

Another wing gone and she was left a wingless fish, territorial and aggressive in a formerly claimless land forgoing her passivity to spiral into chaos in her recluse. What would it take to help her regain her equipoise? Who would be able to accomplish such a task? To accost the former goddess? It was there in the forest that she found her. Though what choice did they both have? Either eternity with the only person in the forest or no company at all. It wasn’t Hobson’s choice. It was a shred of light, a fallen star to guide the long nights to day.

 

On one night in particular as Kim Lip would recall, Jinsoul called for a mirror adorned in turquoise shell from thin air. When the coloration didn’t suit her, she bemoaned her misery. Had she not been in the presence of another, she may have flung it against the furthest tree, casting aside her current appearance with furry. But with Jungeun, the beauty of the blue betta took over it’s angered nature. “Did you know that bettas can reflect the colors of others?” she asked Jungeun who rubbed her shoulders, soothing her. 

 

Jungeun shook her head. She didn’t care nearly as much for animals as Jinsoul did. Then again, she wasn’t the one who created and perfected every living species as she would later come to learn. 

 

Jinsoul carried on with the prettiest wide sparkling eyes that had Jungeun lost for words evermore. “But with blue, turquoise, and green, they’re always iridescent. Appearing to change color based on how you view them. From where you view them. The fishes would pale with stress and take on the color of another when infatuated.”

 

 _Just like you,_ Jungeun thought in her mind, forgetting that Jinsoul could read it. She pictured Jinsoul in the bright vigorous shade of red she loved instead of her accustomed mourning blue. She’d never known how good she looked in red. With a snap of her fingers, she put on Kim Lip’s favorite outfit to both their wonder. And when this red was flowing through her, coloring her vividly so, she was no longer stygian in that moment. The only stye in her eye now was a memory of the past, one she’d be happy to wipe out with little moments like this with her new companion.

 

“Would you stay here with me?” Jinsoul wanted to know. “Forever?” Her affection was gratis, grateful, gratuitous too. Nothing of her words pleading Jungeun to be hers was cogent. Life was a blur more mystifying than a fish’s scales and rectitude was for those with an attitude. Nothing in life had to be arduous given one had the right attitude, said no one ever save Choerry perhaps. 

 

“I mean, I wanna kill you half the time, but I guess I don’t exactly have a choice do I?” Jungeun managed to stumble in her words and get out something to this degree. “I don’t hate you,” she said before cringing at herself, facing away from Jinsoul to make a pained contorted face of flush.

 

“I don’t hate you either, most of the time,” Jinsoul added on to the spoiled moment, endearing it in a way she could never with...someone else. 

 

There was more to their tale. So much more leading up to present day. A whole Choerry story arc yet to be relayed. But Haseul would cut her short there. She had grown stronger without her, true. She had grown weaker without her was an even truer statement. She cleared her throat unnecessarily, squirming like a child who no longer liked this particular bedtime store. 

 

“Should I stop here for now?” Kim Lip read what she wanted to say without having to say it.

 

“No, go on. I want to know everything,” Haseul told her in half-truths. Her actions rather classifiable as prescient or self-preserving, took Kim Lip time still to mull over. They mauled her still. And so, they would writhe together not with the pose and ease of trained dancers but the desperations of worms on the heated cement desperate to survive together.

 

“Take me away,” Haseul broke the stifling silence with her now innermost wish. “To where you need me to be. Let me see what you need me to see.”

 

“Take me too,” a small voice interjected.

 

 

 

* * *

 **Sorry it took so long for me to update… TT I... actually saw and interacted with my two top biases Gowon and Olivia (surprise, not surprise?) in real life at their solo fansigns!!! What a story all that was lol. See my Twitter ([ _twitter.com/12butterflymoon_](twitter.com/12butterflymoon)) for my fan accounts of those and much, much more. ** **Anyways, how was it? I know it’s been a while. This chapter was mostly flashbacks but necessary.**

**Will edit later. Please do comment, let me know what you’d like to see next. And help me promote and share the story with others~ _#LoonaverseTale_**

 

**_Brief Preview (in no particular order):_ **

Time, engraved by a mysterious secret. Every minute, every second after they quickly crossed this sleepless night, all came true. Their sonatine played for new ears.

 

“Well, any words?”

 

“I would make some inappropriate joke about death or snark comment about suffering, but nothing is coming to me.” She needed someone more facetious than her. Where was her picaresque tale in a world far from picturesque? Her rowdy less than heroic heroine? She needed the opposite of a flibbertigibbet, someone more likely to be flippant than spewing gibberish non-stop. And she would adhere to this manifesto of hers like a bumptious candidate before an election. But she didn’t pick this. She’d never vote for this. 

 

The site smelled more mephitic now than it once had even with the stench of implosion and human decay. It was then that the hypermnesia brought a forgotten her back to life. “It’s you, isn’t it? The little bird that crashed the big plane...taking down the lives of all with you? Taking me away from mine.”


	9. Musical Dreams

**Chapter 9**   _in which 2jin go on a date but of course there's more to the story, Vivi finds herself alone again thinking of times when she wasn't, Choerry too thinks of what has happened and what could be, Hyewon have a moment or do they...?_

* * *

 

 

It was a pink world with Heejin by her side. In this beautiful sunny place, the Ttukseom Han River Park, it wasn’t the fresh riverside air, the trains passing by in the distance perched above on vine entwined beams, nor the countless friendly animal friends allowed to roam free for a change that took Hyunjin’s fluttering heart. She had always been there with her twenty-four seven, every single day. So since when did their feelings become the same? Which of the three hundred sixty-five days was it? In time, they would discover it could’ve been any of those days. But for today in particular of those days, Hyunjin wished her certain someone would give her her love already instead of stealing her salmon kimbap. There were many ways to describe Heejin’s perfection. Too numerous to attempt. Yet, graceful eating didn’t number among one of her admirable traits. Hyunjin had meant it when she thought to herself it was a pink world with Heejin here. 

 

“Yah, can’t you be a bit more careful?” she requested of Heejin who heard her not.

 

Bits of salmon fell here and there as she protested Heejin’s waste of food. She truly sucked at multitasking as well, so why couldn’t she put down her diary? Hyunjin had to admit though that this was something she liked about her, admired about her. The patience to keep a diary when the likes of Hyejoo didn’t have to energy to. Filling it with dreams and doodles when Hyejoo would fill hers with dread, despair and all things dreary. Though it wasn’t an unknown girl’s desolation that Hyunjin disdained. With one ‘casual’ glimpse at Heejin’s latest entry, she saw mentions of others, their beauties and their triumphs. There was a fan girl deep inside Heejin it turned out, gushing about Kim Lip’s appealing cheekiness and great skin, Jiwoo’s adorable antics and amiability, Jinsoul’s under evaluation of her own beauty. Gosh, did Heejin have to go on and on about every pretty girl she saw?

 

So this was how Heejin kept every day feeling new, filling her pages with these good flutterings. If she would just look down at her lap, Hyunjin would show her though that she was the one that would be there always. Not like her new flaky friends that seemingly vanished one by one for no blatant cause nor reason. Having her time with Heejin stopped like this, her dream-like time coming back at her like this, Hyunjin who had felt so high all the time suddenly didn’t feel so well. She had been feeling elevated, out of this world since they had become an item. A one plus one package deal as Korean besties would put it. That was where her high felt unnatural and trippy. Why’d it sometimes feel like she was just a best friend and little more?

 

When Heejin continued on giving Hyunjin only crumbs, the sky too did the same. When it became rain and fell from the sky in dribbles, the scent of a rainy scenic city filled up the site. The scent of Heejin filled up the world in the place they shared together on that picnic cloth.

 

“Should we head back?” mumbled a little or a lot dolorous Dolores Hyunjin wondering just where she was, who she was in this circle of things. Her days starting to feel repetitive like she was in her own Westworld. She was enervated by Heejin’s elusiveness. Tired by a chase seemingly gone cold mid-rush time and time again. 

 

“No, I like it out here,” Heejin smiled at her leather bound journal instead of resentment bound companion. No veteran to love, she was an inveterate artist, so consumed with whatever her singular pursuit of the moment, enraptured by whatever was on hand. She often neglected what was right in her other non-dominant hand. The person waiting on her. 

 

When they both refuted the drizzle and refused to budge from their spot, the sky gave in and the setting sun came back out from the fastest game of hide and seek, overtaking the blue star that brightly rose in the absence of yellow light. And again, Hyunjin had a clear idea of what she wanted: to share stories of hidden sunlight all night with Heejin and fall asleep in her fairy tale. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Perhaps it was her fairytale alone. She wasn’t poisoned by fairy tales, rather by reality. A reality in which the cat peasant wasn’t good enough for the perfect princess. Why did Hyunjin vilipend herself so much more than a villian with years of anguish pented up?

 

This was it. The change into self-loathing adulthood perhaps. If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterfly. But there wouldn’t be a mature cat where there was once a gullible kitten needing nurturing either. How dare Heejin finally put down her stupid diary to pat her head like she was a hurt animal needing care? Hyunjin was contradicting herself in her pittiful pettiness. She was more of a kitten than Heejin was a puppy. Her puppy. “Puppy,” she snapped at her, demanding she make up for every second of neglect, every word she wrote about other women that Hyunjin most definitely didn’t ‘accidentally’ peak at. 

 

Heejin cringed, scrunching up her fingers. “Not in public, will you?” she pleaded. She kept a journal to keep some things deep in her heart, but there were certain things, certain people, she liked even more private. Things like this embarrassing first love she was still too bashful about to be able to properly pen. 

 

Hyunjin pouted, rolling in her lap. “Is Heejin-ah or bunny/tokki better than?” She judged the answer from Heejin’s level of silent squealing. It was about even for both. “Heeki then?” she combined into one, a proud masterful Shakespear if she could crown herself. Heejin didn’t answer verbally, instead opening the eyes she had clenched in demureness back up the last of the warm sunlight. She smiled at the song she heard time and time again playing as part of the evening fountain light show. It became special that day because she was so happy that day. It was a simple joy, the peace of mind of a rabbit knowing it’ll always have a carrot, an animal lover knowing she’ll always have this loving cat in her lap.

 

It was in this calm fashion that they sat, listening to time pass, sun and moons set and stars rise, until at last enlivened by emotion but numbed by the weight on her legs for all these hours, Heejin suggested they leave. She hopped on her longboard, ever the eager new novelty sport enthusiast but never the athlete. Lucky for her, Hyunjin sped walk at the same speed that she skated. She could only laugh at her struggles, a twenty-something-year-old that still had a helmet on when kids had long ditched theirs when parents weren’t watching. Another indication she was worse than a kid was when she stopped abruptly in front of a PC gaming center with ads for some popular shooter game. If only someone would teach her how to play such things, she commented offhandedly. This was Heejin at her finest, Hyunjin thought. The wannabe gamer girl, the sudoku master who’d boast that she had out sudoku-ed their new friend Chaewon, the failed skater anime fan who stumbled off her longboard then Naruto ran to go fetch it from a bush.

 

Could this dorky nerd get any more embarrassing? Hyunjin supposed she’d have to spend even more time with her than she already did to find out. They were a reflection looking at its owner and back both complementing each other while belittling their identical self. Perhaps what they needed most was more compliments to reassure them of their respective worths and shared affection. And though Heejin didn’t speak as smoothly as Yves, she wasn’t as abrupt as Kim Lip nor coarse as Olivia either. “Come on you big baby, come here,” she extended her free hand to her. Board in one hand and her girl in the other instead of her usual lollipop. This was sweeter than candy, no?  

 

The dark blue sky, the refreshing wind. It had been a perfect day. Their story would continue to fill up this place, Heejin and Hyunjin together in a secret diary that need not writing. In one step they took together there were butterflies. In two there were kisses. They couldn’t hide their own secret party anymore, could they? Stars filling the sky couldn’t outnumber the stories they sought to tell together. That was, until they heard cameras clicking, people loudly gazing. Who wouldn’t stop to admire Heejin, Hyunjin hit her foot on their run away remembering.

 

This was the downside to being universally adored for no good reason by complete strangers except for her deadly beauty. She was so loved it sickened Hyunjin with rage. She was hers was she not? She asked herself yet again. How rare it was for humans to find someone who loved them, but it wasn’t rare at all for Heejin was it? Hyunjin fumed with grumpy silent smoke seething out of her. She was fervid with vividness the likes of which even Vivi had never seen in her milleniums on earth. Couldn’t this beauty be hers alone? Didn’t Heejin’s mothers (rest their souls) have wished for something else, or chosen their dying wish more thoughtfully so that everyone and their sister didn’t want to pounce on Heejin?

 

Hyunjin had to give it to them though. How could you not love this girl? Her hair so lush, her face so flush, her chin so sharp and her neck so inviting. On their run home, hand in hand, Hyunjin couldn’t help wanting to be closer still. More intimate in ways she’d never known, to rub in the face of the myriad admirers. Where the heck was her consciousness? What was this concupiscence she was feeling for the first time so boldly in public? She hissed at a passing bird who told her it was first love’s lust. Animals knew best that love wasn’t necessarily the purest. It could be animalistic, primal.

 

A sigh of frustration wasn’t enough. Twelve million of them wouldn’t do either. When she wanted to be, Heejin was cool as ice. Her scaturient coolness saturated Hyunjin. She succumbed to her stunning beauty, motionless until Heejin succumbed to her own lack of breathe, hurling forward most ungracefully needing Hyunjin to reel her in. Heejin was laughing at herself when Hyunjin silenced her was a kiss to end all other kisses. Heatedness to flush out all the other heated followers. A demanding touch that demanded both their full attention. From the top of her dainty head to the tip of her pointed toes, Hyunjin would have it all, even her heart. This was the only thing she wanted. The happiness that her parents wished for her - this was it. Only this, her love. Just Heejin and Heejin alone. She had wanted since the start to have all of her, the whole of her, getting attracted even more as she marked her hers. Again and again and an otherwise empty house that echoed their every motion.

 

When Hyunjin stopped herself momentarily, head hiding in Heejin’s neck, her heart raced needing a final affirmation. “Am I your-”

 

“You’re my favorite.” Heejin confirmed. That was all that needed to be said, was it not? What was she doing tomorrow? The day after? The week after? The subsequent years to come? It didn’t matter. She’d clear up her schedule for her, replace those others in her journal with her. She’d tell Hyunjin everything, everything she wanted and needed to hear. She’d opened up to her, and not just her heart.

 

On Hyunjin’s part, not just her heart, her whole body lied there unable to move even if she were to tell herself to tie her shoelaces and just do it. To run to her. They hadn’t gone any further than kissing in the extent of their new relationship, and here she was already paralyzed by Heejin’s three words. And not your typical three words either. It was true, lovers were happy when they were doing nothing. The day going by just thinking of each other. Coming together with no more worries needed.

 

The idea that she might lose her had kept Hyunjin anxious, still keeps her anxious. But that sassy girl that Heejin was, that girl looking at her was just as afraid as she was. “That girl that you saw,” Heejin in her mock confidence too cracked. “What’s she like? The bat girl. The one you always dream about without even realizing.”

 

Unsusceptible to big reactions though truly taken back but the sudden question, Hyunjin too came clean. So it bothered Heejin this much, this person that she never spoke of aloud. She had to know of the true extent of the matter then. “Would you believe me if I told you she isn’t the only one I sometimes see?” 

 

***

 

If only Vivi didn’t see and didn’t hear everything always. True Heejin and Hyunjin were the only souls in the house, but robots didn’t exactly have a soul now did they? In a very close place, in a place where she wished someone would reach if they just held their hands out, Vivi sat there with her true feelings and no one to share them with. She could write a twelve novels long history of witnessing love and lovers come and go yet never having experienced her own. It used to be that Haseul would just come to her at the littlest poke, the slightest inclination of her solitude. But if she knew now, would she still come to her?

 

She had always been the robot friend, the mom friend, the guardian robot. Now she wanted to know, know what more she was to them. To one of them in particular. The one that got away, running away with a girl she had once ran away from and into Vivi’s arms for. It made no sense. The problem of Haseul was her biggest unsolvable homework, uncomputable equation. There was nothing that quite equated to her. Not that Vivi could find in all her programing and learned interactions as she sat there rigidly scanning and rescanning, analyzing and overanalyzing everything in her code and memory banks. She spent her days now with a frustrated heartdrive. So this was what humans called missing someone, wanting to see them right now. Rather than her typical dreams she couldn’t recall, there were many things she wanted to share with Haseul. What was going on just one door away from her was one of these things. She wanted this thing the roommate friends to lovers had, to be held in someone’s arms and tell them that she liked them a lot.

 

In her incipient form, Vivi was made to love but a single person. So why was it that now she cared so dearly for every being, human and animal alike, perhaps more than they’d ever care for her back? Though there was one above all others of course. It was juvenile for such an old piece of machinery wasn’t it? If Yeojin knew, she’d laugh at her. If Jiwoo was here to overhear, she’d offer her own piece of affection to her, and it sure wasn’t the affection that Vivi sought. Jiwoo could latch onto anyone and say they were meant to be soulmates in another life perhaps, the way she did with Kim Lip who was so opposite of her. Vivi certainly wasn’t Jiwoo-like at all. She couldn’t make up elaborate stories of what could have been, what could be. She was honest and simple. To put it plainly as Yeojin told her was best to do, if Haseul was here and had not been snatched from her, she would tell her, she likes her a lot with all her heart.

 

To love and live was human, to love and be evil was also human. Vivi had witnessed love in many forms and she had also found unintended evil. But she had yet to live, not the way these humans did. After running for so long, she still looked at the other girls who breathed and got tired thinking why couldn’t she do the same. She thought she had broken away from the track, a clean streak off the paved path yet found herself here again asking why it was not as hard for her as it was for her friends? Why couldn’t they live simply like her? Being unchanging like her? 

 

These on-going quieres brought to mind the day she first saw Jinsoul, dripping and empty, holding that empty fish bag. She looked every bit a loonatic who everyone sought to avoid in the aquarium. Everyone except the android who saw in her a need for equilibrium. Surrounding them was aquatic life, but Jinsoul was meant to fly high. Vivi sensed it. “What brought you here?” she had asked her, rushing to her with a towel from the closest gift shop, warding off officers assuring them Jinsoul wasn’t insane.

 

It was another Vivi and Haseul date, if you could call them that in retrospect. Oh, how she missed them. They were both factotums doing all sorts of work that many people combined were meant to achieve, she and Vivi. They did it all, had it all. What a dynamic duo they were, a complementary couple. It had been Haseul’s idea to try the idol life, but it was Vivi’s idea to run from it. To find peace out here where the youth didn’t toil away in dance studios or cram schools. In the places where the young actually lived and loved. And that was what struck Vivi the most about this lost girl, a striking visual so different from her and so similar. Maybe she just wanted to be loved, too.

 

When the towel fell from Jinsoul’s now naked body and Haseul yelped, turning away in haste, Vivi instead inspected her beauty even more intimately. “The sin of swallowing up the afternoon sun. The sin of swallowing up all the stars in the sky,” was Jinsoul’s cryptic retort in a voice so piercingly deep that when she dropped unconscious and remembered little of the exact details of this encounter, Haseul and Vivi both would never completely forget.

 

She didn’t forget it long after she had moved in with them, asking the most curious of things. “Do you even need to eat since you’re an android?” Jinsoul had marveled at her every chew. Perhaps it was the stars she had swallowed that gave her such brightness. The afternoon sun that bleached her hair and colored her face all warm and approachable.

 

Glad to have someone ask her this again for the first time since little Yeojin requested to see the inside of her mechanical throat and Haseul had swatted her curious prying little fingers away from Vivi’s open mouth, she answered honestly, “I don’t need to, but I’m fine with anything Haseul cooks or anything Yeojin orders for me. Makes me wish I had a mom sometimes though.” 

 

“So she could cook for you?” Haseul had laughed at her. “Don’t tell me you’re judging my cooking now. It’s free food you know. I already pay you rent money, I technically don’t have to-”

 

“No, so she could cook for you,” Vivi cut her short with this unexpected line, causing Haseul to redden and Jinsoul to fawn over the fawn-like robot. Her salutary warmth was the most beneficial to Haseul out of everyone. But Haseul wasn’t here any longer was she? Vivi had to remind herself this. She had already run off the way humans do, taking the path they shouldn’t take, making Vivi the desuetude of a short-lived fling once more.

 

Vivi was the penumbra to other’s opaqueness. Lying in the shadow of a moon, a bird, an apple even, waiting for the sun to shine on the other side and strike out her darkness. Time was engraved by a mysterious secret. Every minute, every second after she quickly crossed her sleepless nights waiting for someone to greet her. If she had any knowledge that someone would be there, she would surely hurry even more and have strength for a new world to open up to her. The earth was old and Vivi felt even older, tired of living though not living. It used to be that the sweetest of music, the strongest of programming couldn’t efface the affection Vivi still had written on her face. Now, that face was saved for the singsong dream of all dreams alone. 

 

She could have a dreamless, song-less sleep, but she chose to see her again in her slumber. Going back to her was facultative. Yes, that was true. Though there was more fact than fiction in Vivi’s own faults. It was a fact that she still loved her, a little or a lot more than anyone else. But who exactly was this _‘her’_ on her mind? Was it the girl who made her house a home, or the girl who took an earphone out of her ear whispering her last words of love to her before taking away their shared memories inside an old cassette player?

 

Yves smiles like a first love, both Jinsoul and Vivi could attest. Her words more munificent than her true hidden intents. Vivi owed her life to her whereas she owed Chuu hers. It was what made her not so divine. She hurt everyone she cared for, Vivi remembered. At this memory, her mind fizzed again. It whizzed with confusion as she first whirled across the smooth floor with Yves then found herself teaching Haseul proper bowling posture.

 

Was it Haseul’s butt wiggling against her as she held her back, or was it Yves supporting her from behind as she first learned to skate? Who was who? What was what? Had she gathered the girls here to sing a sonatine to cast an arcane spell of love, or had they bestowed her with the most natural and effortless of love that she still couldn’t wrap her coding around? Everything in her dream changed so fast. Only the music in her cassette player was the same. But that cassette player wasn’t here any longer to play the truthful melodies of Vivi’s past. It had been taken from her, out of her. And she would give anything to have it back. To know once and for all everything, to remember everything. Perhaps only then could she know if it had been true love, if this now was love. Not one-sided, not manufactured nor programed but human. Living and breathing. Loving and pure. Her sonatine played for new ears. 

 

The song overhead was sweeter than Haseul’s operatic overtures, more enticing than Yves was enthralling. It was Vivi’s voice but it wasn’t at the same time. As she toggled between visions of her with Yves in deep dark places versus her with Haseul in the light out and about, she smiled a conflicted smile with her eyes shut tight. Yves killed so indiscriminately, so unintentionally sometimes and so intentional the next without ever considering that some couples were always meant to meet and love. Haseul though loved so indiscriminately, so unparalleled sometimes and so biasedly others without ever considering that some individuals were always meant to need her more than others. Both their ways should bother Vivi much more than it did. This was her dream world though. She didn’t have to take into consideration these shortcomings. Even if time passed unnaturally in her sleep, Vivi still wanted to dream. Her precious shared dream that she wanted so much. She didn’t want to wake up from this distortion just yet. At least in her dysfunctional version of her memories she knew without a doubt that she was loved.

 

***

 

In the frozen time, Yeojin sat stone solid listening to Choerry remember strange memories that built up on each other one by one. She felt she was born again, a newly envisaged melody greeting her with shivers running deep. She shouldn’t have headed towards the light of truth. Haseul and Vivi’s  voices weren’t here to tell her not to though. So she pried her ears opened a bit longer, willing herself to listen to Cheorry’s preposterous story some more. With every word of her supposed hidden history, everything that had once seemed so precious to her now seemed so questionable. 

 

Everything about Haseul, about Kim Lip, about she herself and the universe as she knew it became part of an impossible song. A lunar lore of Möbius proportions. Her melody that she often sung to herself until she fell asleep now seemed irrelevant in contrast to Choerry showing her this deepest part of hearts. And when Yeojin had heard enough, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she remembered her motto. At least this still stood true. Life is all about speed, and she wanted nothing more than to storm out of there. So she ran, ran as quick as her little green feet of fresh youth would take her.

 

Was she running into the forest of trees or the forest of people? Choerry didn’t know. She could only hope she had done the right thing by telling her. Only then could she decide for herself where she needed to be. Only then could they all meet anew. Or so Choerry’s forest-given prophecy had said. _Leave it to the youngest to decide the fate of the twelve_ , the trees had whispered to her. _Leave it to the full moon. Run until you can all take off, fly high. The meeting and the beginning of twelve, higher than expectations._

 

How could she know what to expect when this all seemed above expectation? Above anything that even Jinsoul could comprehend. And she had been the one who crafted the universe. So why was it that she had no control over it? Choerry picked up a frog plushie that Yeojin had left behind and let the free spirited girl’s unpredictable ways answer her question for her. It was free will. But if there was free will without the desires of the creator, then why were they still destined to meet? It made no sense. What did make sense though, was that Jinsoul had so loved Yves, so loved the world, that she would give herself for it. A mother’s insurpassible love. 

 

She was further reminded of it one time Hyejoo had protested her favorite story and movie franchise  of all time. “Okay, so you’re telling me that a mother’s love is stronger than death? That it brought Harry back to live but also killed the ugly bald guy? This series makes no sense. And it’s as cheesy as not Eden,” she had thrown the remote at Choerry, blaming her for wasting her time. Leave it to Choerry alone to be able to get Hyejoo into watching an entire lengthy series instead of playing games. But a wolf only had so much patience. Eight epic-lengthed movies over eight days in the in-between with Choerry to get to this conclusion had Hyejoo irritable out of her mind. Choerry chose to think of her furious face and laugh instead of thinking of the seriousness of the situation she had gotten them all into right now. Wasn’t it a better time in the in-between, just her and Hyejoo?

 

Call it sweet, call it crazy, call it love. Yeojin wouldn’t understand what it meant to be colored by touch. But Choerry did. She had been so touched by that strange lonesome girl in the gardens though they hadn’t once touched. She had understood from watching her every step in the mirror field what Jinsoul felt when she first laid eyes on Jungeun. Jinsoul had only told her this story once because she pleaded to know who was that Teacher who forbade Hyejoo from leaving the premise of Eden to play with Choerry. 

 

It had started like this: a memory of the past, a song singer coming to Jinsoul singing of the joys of Eden but the lack of guidance, the lack of control especially when she was away. Jinsoul, giving as ever, pulled out the last of her reason and logic, her formality and primness to make yet another gift. A Teacher for Yves and her companions, another something for her to remember her by, to resent her by, to dream of her by. And thus, finished her fall into the sea, leaving her a lasting scar. And when this scar would bother Jinsoul like Harry’s mark of love would bother him, her fingers would attempt to cover it up only to be stopped and held by Jungeun. 

 

The lights of the forest was stellate around Jinsoul, forming a stellar feast of beauty, an aurora of affection around the star of all these parts. How could Jungeun not be mesmerised by the most alluring of all the stars? A star powerful enough to take down all the moons and suns had she want to. When Yves took Jiwoo as her own, renaming her Chuu, it had also brought down another. It had brought the person who would have been her _co_ here. Here to Jinsoul. She had to take her into her moonlight before letting her inside her heart. So she showed her herself in her salient bareness, in her fertile beauty. Sometimes the stars shine brighter when the night is over. Jinsoul didn’t really care then if it was night or day. It all seemed so bright with her here. Someone who asked nothing of her but wanted to give everything up to her. To create a new life with her.

 

Choerry would call them insane, telling her her birth story in such graphic fashion when most Korean parents would speak of conception dreams instead. She’d remember how they used to say that they weren’t insane. They were dreaming of their own fantasies, dreaming of their own galaxies. They didn’t care if Choerry blamed them for oversharing. They were getting closer as a family that way, they’d say, playing in the oceans of mind together.

 

How nice it would have been if they could all stay here. If they didn’t have to let each other go for this final mission hoping it would bring everyone to some much needed conclusion that they themselves weren’t sure of. Choerry wished she could say that she didn’t really care now. That she could go on being Hyejoo’s friend, Yeojin’s friend, a carefree bat girl. But the twists and intersections of the Möbius strip wouldn’t allow for it. Her future and past selves who both would and had lived as her and stared back at her wouldn’t allow for it. It was a lunatic story, all of it. It was their shared lunatic story.

 

***

 

“Well, any words?” a freezing Haseul asked of a frozen Chaewon as they stood over what remained of a once great plane. She had been rambling to Chaewon this whole trip far north and far from home. Some sacred pilgrimage that Kim Lip had insisted she take part in but wouldn’t join her in. Yet, Chaewon had eagerly signed up to go along.

 

“I would make some inappropriate joke about death or snark comment about suffering, but nothing is coming to me,” came Chaewon’s reply sharper than the biting cold. She needed someone more facetious than her. Where was her picaresque tale in a world far from picturesque? Her rowdy less than heroic heroine? She needed the opposite of a flibbertigibbet like Haseul, someone more likely to be flippant than spewing gibberish non-stop. And she would adhere to this manifesto of hers like a bumptious candidate before an election. But she didn’t pick this. She’d never vote for this. 

 

The site smelled more mephitic now than it once had even with the stench of implosion and human decay. It was then that the hypermnesia brought a forgotten her back to life. In this unknown place, this unfamiliar place, Chaewon knew she was lost though she knew where she was and who she had been. It felt like no one was coming. She was here with Haseul but she was here all alone. Which way should she go? Like she was trapped in a maze of ice. A barren land stretching everywhere, a land of death. “It’s you, isn’t it? The little bird that crashed the big plane, getting all crushed in it’s propeller and taking down the lives of all with you? Taking me away from mine,” she reminded Haseul of her past life, and herself of hers. 

 

“What are you talking about?” Haseul strained her ear against the frosty wind, thinking she had heard wrong. Perhaps Chaewon had been exposed to the elements for too long. Maybe she was delirious now.

 

“No, it’s my corpse that was exposed to the elements for too long. It’s my former mind that went delirious,” she fought Haseul’s unspoken words like this, biting back her instantly crystalized tears like this. But she couldn’t fight any of it any longer. She just wanted to get away and that she did. She walked blankly. The eerie melodies of this perverse verse in Chaewon’s journey started in the spring passing through into summer, where it reached the chorus hitting her like winter waiting for flowers to bloom again. Here in the frozen wasteland, the wreckage of humanity however, there was not a single flower in sight. Not so much as a loose dandelion, only the stray feather of a long dead pigeon refusing to fully decay. And it wasn’t the only departed with firm resolution.

 

Once long ago, another of these dead were a resilient spirit too, Chaewon recalled. She slept on an overcrowded bed of pink dolls. So stuffed to the brim that she sometimes found herself sleeping on the floor instead. She had a habit of being a sleepy child. A habit that had gotten her beaten once for falling asleep during holiday mass. She was too young to understand why then, and even now that she did, she still thought of it as cruel. How could a child be punished for something they couldn’t control, something that would carry on even into adulthood. Harmlessly so, helpfully so. Sleep was all she wanted now.

 

Her recidivism was no different from Yves’s. If Yves could ask for life again and again, Chaewon could ask for death again also. She wanted to be a somnolent sleeping beauty once more. To be frozen in time. A time of paradistical gardens and eternal soulmates. A time in which she was a lively princess and not a rotten fake. A forgotten mummy. How could a child be punished for something they couldn’t understand? How dare fate take her life when she was at the peak of her career, about to actually be beloved by all instead of pretending she was on screen outside her cramped miserly home a far cry from heavenly castles. 

 

It was in this illusion of happiness that she had found true traces of bliss with her, was it not? The fake knight to her fake princess status. _She_ used to be colder than her, sleeping with an electric blanket when Gowon wanted a cold draft through the room. They would compromise, letting a gentle breeze pass by them as they cuddled together. Where was she to hold her and shield her from the frigidity now? If Chaewon could see some guidance at the end of this endless wandering, if she does see her, she’d want to ask her where she should go. After all, she was her destiny wherever she was. Wasn’t she?   

 

There was only one way in pass her mask of ice, and that through her still fiery heart. Chaewon was already pallid with cold, a frostbitten palace-less con awaiting her paladin. She would die again waiting for her. It was impossible, but so was this universe. The fantasies they had contrived and arrived at. But it was all here. She was here, be it death’s final illusion or not, Chaewon would take it wanting so badly to be _her_ Gowon again. _Hers._

 

And there she was, the impossible girl, clad in black and white instead of bright yellow. Solitary and wordess. Gowon and Yves could speak other languages with fluency, the words rolling off their tongues smoother than butter. Whereas Chuu and Olivia’s tongues were inhibited by scathing numbness. So many unknown factors preventing the words, let alone sentences, flow free. Hyejoo had thought for a long time, pacing alone in the forest thinking what she would say to the people who left her behind and struggled to think of any kind words at all. Wouldn’t it be great, Hyejoo had thought to herself, if she was the main character in everyone’s TV. The central figure of every arc in which others were simply guests? But then there was _her_. She wasn’t a mere guest, was she? They both weren’t merely each other’s guest, were they? She wanted to run to her, to hug her, to hold her. 

 

The moment they first looked into each other’s eyes and felt that summer they had been waiting for so long, the deep ice castle they were trapped in was opened. How could they not react to the sole owner of the key to their escape, the possessor of the warm embrace. To be honest, they were both frozen, frozen solid needing to be melted before it was too late. To be shined on, making flowers more resplendent than Eden’s iridescent dandelions bloom from the frozen ground.

 

They should’ve hugged, hugged more and more deeply to be each other’s suns. But both still couldn’t be sure that they weren’t just dreaming. That they weren’t just each other’s phantom flower blossoming with each other’s warmth. Blooming inside each other’s hearts. Could the frozen sky just melt already? The cold wind be stopped already so they could finally be met with a new season? They were both too scared to break down the walls of the ice palace, so please, could someone melt them? Turn the waiting into a heart fluttering feeling?

 

Unable to contain it anymore, unable to distinguish dream from reality and impossible from fated anymore, Hyejoo spoke to her at long last. Her first words in an eon to the crestfallen crescent? “Well, you look...terrible,” she said to her softly, an arms length apart and still too scared to hold her. 

 

Intimidated by the same fears and inhibitions, Chaewon of which Hyejoo knew nothing of answered back as timidly. “Thanks,” she greeted her with some warmth in place of her usual petulancy at such insult. Had they been apart for long enough that she would willing play the role of her belittled pet? She talked to her so deplorably. Why was that she took her antics to heart so adorably instead?

 

“No, I mean it,” Hyejoo found herself cracking a joke at her favorite’s expense again. Just like old times immortal. “You look like you just swallowed a whole raw fish and unfortunately lived to tell the tale.” She was being malapert again, an impudent brat daring her company to reprimand her. 

 

“Hyejoo! You-” 

 

She waited for her fit. Wanting her to roll her eyes at her, take a jab at her, shower her with angered affection. But she should’ve known. Known the second they didn’t touch on first encounter that it was no physical encounter at all. It wasn’t Gowon’s dream at all. It was Hyejoo’s isolated delusion. It wasn’t Gowon’s soft, melodic voice at all but another’s.

 

“Hyejoo!” Yves called for the infinite time, rousing her from her forest induced sleep. Had Hyejoo gotten lost in the forest and come back a prophetic savant like Haseul? She feared she just did. Her dream so vivid couldn’t have made her more livid than this presence here. This couldn’t actually be Yves calling her from far below the tree she slept in, the high height up of a diving board could it?

 

This path she had walked on together with Gowon just now in her slumber kept getting fainter. She couldn’t find the way back no matter how hard she closed her eyes. Tell her it was Gowon, only Gowon on the promised road. Even towards the end of all time, she’d still be right here. She didn’t want her love to be just a one way for her alone. For the road in Gowon’s heart to be blocked. 

 

Yet, try as she may, images of Gowon would no longer come to her. Instead, down below in the likes of an empty, long abandoned pool of a forest clearing was Yves going on and on. “I know, I know. I know it was all my fault. Now would you please open your eyes. I’m real. I mean, look at me!” She ran in fast circles to prove her point, ever the best athlete among them.

 

“Fuck you, you’re just an illusion. I must be tripping hard still over whatever that fruit was you had in your closet,” came Hyejoo’s strong response from above.

 

Had Yves not still been reeling with remorse, she’d jump up high and slap sense into her. Having considered it momentarily, she thought of a better way to reach Hyejoo instead. To stir her into action. “You’re vision just now about your soulmate-”

 

“What?” Hyejoo pretended not to hear her, clogging her ears.

 

“About what’s about to happen to Gowon down on Earth...don’t you want to stop her? To protect her from the truth?”

 

_“What?!”_

 

* * *

 **Dun dun dun. I’ll explain things later as always but feel free to ask any questions if you need some clarifcation. As usual, w** **ill edit later. Please do comment, let me know what you think and you’d like to see next.**

 **Kudos are always much appreciated!** **And help me promote and share the story with others~ _#LoonaverseTale_**

 

_Next Chapter Spoilers (in no particular order):_

She truly didn’t need a crown, a people, Eden nor some predestined counterpart. All she needed was her own self-chosen soulmate. And she would run and run until she could run into her once more.

 

“You’re not a machine that needs fixing or a robot that needs assembling. You’re perfect...to me.”

 

She could hear the stronger rain coming that Haseul could not. She could feel the tragedy about to wash down on them when Haseul could not. She had never despised pluviophiles until she saw them there, singing in the rain together. It felt like a flu, the worst of which for there was no remedy. No melody, no medicine that could ever cure this rain-strucken affliction. 

 

Was it peculiar for those of everlasting life to crave the knowledge held by the experience of death?

 

“What if we were meant to dream of our counterpart but could chose to dream of our soulmate instead? Envision their future, our own chosen future instead?”

 

“But I still love you.”


	10. [PREVIEW + ANNOUNCEMENT]

**Author’s Note:** Hi everyone! So I’ll be traveling for two weeks and since I’m too exhausted as of late to finish the update right now, I’ll do it after I get back. I’ll give you more spoilers below though, if you want to read them ahead of time. I'll delete this announcement + preview later, before I update.

 

Also, **_IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT_** after vacation, I’ll also be editing and adding to the previous chapters a tad. Not a total rewrite, but I do want to clarify any points that could be confusing or I think just need more elaborating on. Idk, sometimes I feel like I'm just writing for myself and talking to myself lol... _TT_ Do y'all enjoy the story? What do you really think about it?

 

I know most of you are silent readers, but _please, please_ let me know what I should go back and clarify or what you want to read more about in the future. I'm also going to start writing little short chapter intros to try to make some things a little more obvious even though the writing style is supposed to be a bit more cryptical and, well, chaotic. Again though, please do comment if you're confused about anything or want me to include anything specific in the story ^^

 

 

Without further ado, here are **_More Spoilers (in no particular order):_ **

We pick up with Chaewon where we left her last, constipated and contemplating the meaning of love and friendship on the toilet seat.

 

Because she asked for nothing, she wanted to give her the best of the worlds. The most extravagant of gifts disguised as the blandest and meekest of displays of affections.

 

Fifty-one decibels; the precise loudness of rain humans cared for not yet robots calculated with the highest precision.

 

What if life was folded paper moons and Haseul was wandering in-between in the middle of the crease?

 

Love wasn’t a rollercoaster, it was a seesaw. One person is up while the other is down. It can be impossible to see eye to eye.

 

“People nowadays speak of The Great Storm we caused, you know.”

“But no one alive remembers The Great War. No one except Gowon now that she's down there.”

 

So curious in the scorching heat, flying too high. High, high to the point of incineration.

 

Corruptible goddesses needed to be chastened too, chastised for their lunacy. It wasn’t only humans who became lunatics under the full moon.

 

Olivia wasn’t Yves’s apostle just as Yves was no goddess to Olivia. 

 

“I’m thinking of making someone. What should I name her? Lilith?” 

"Ooh, so like Lili for short? What, what are you laughing?"

"You really should work on your English. It sounds like _'Vivi'_ when you say it."

 

She wasn’t the only one who knew something about Yves that no one else in the three dimensions knew. What if Yves wasn’t all that evil after all? That in her decisions of destruction, she had spared someone…


End file.
